How has international law been strategically deployed to shape the Palestinian struggle for freedom across a century-long arc, from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza. Join host Sahar Aziz in conversation with Noura Erakat about the promise and risk of international law in the pursuit of Palestinian freedom and the broader relationship between law and liberation.

Our discussion examines the concept of "legal work"—the deliberate efforts by powerful actors to bend legal doctrine to their objectives—and how this has transformed international law to advance certain interests over others. We delve into the "sovereign exception" framework that has enabled the creation of exceptional legal categories excluding Palestinians from otherwise applicable protections, from the British Mandate period through Israeli occupation and colonization. Legal strategies have been used to consolidate territorial control, facilitate dispossession, and legitimize military tactics that compromise civilian protections globally, while also exploring moments when weaker actors have leveraged law's emancipatory potential through strategic and tactical ingenuity.

Professor Noura Erakat’s groundbreaking work demonstrates that the law's current outcomes were never inevitable—that law is politics, and its meaning depends on political intervention by states and people alike. Through original interviews with principals from Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and comprehensive historical analysis, she reveals how Palestinian leaders gained significant legal victories at the UN before eventually exchanging hard-won international recognition for a bilateral peace process that accelerated their dispossession. Her work shows both the profound limitations of international law when serving the powerful and its counterintuitive utility when mobilized in support of political movements seeking liberation.

Biography

Noura Erakat is Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is a legal scholar with research interests in humanitarian law, human rights law, critical race theory, national security law, and Palestinian Studies. She has published over two dozen academic articles and book chapters, including in the American Journal of International Law, American Quarterly, and the Oxford Bibliographies in International Law.

Recommended Reading

Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford 2019)

Rashid Khalidi, The One Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (MacMillan 2020)

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #ICC #HumanRights #InternationalLaw

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In this episode, Professor Vernellia Randall presents a groundbreaking analysis of how centuries of systemic racism have created and perpetuated devastating health disparities within African American communities. Drawing from extensive research, she traces the direct lineage from the "slave health deficit" established during slavery through Jim Crow segregation to today's persistent health inequalities, revealing how African Americans continue to experience disproportionately higher rates of disease, infant mortality, and premature death. Her work demonstrates that these disparities are not coincidental but represent the ongoing legacy of institutionalized racism that has never been adequately addressed through legal or policy interventions.

Professor Randall's work extends beyond documenting health disparities to exploring the systemic barriers within healthcare delivery itself, including discriminatory access to hospitals, nursing homes, and quality medical care. She argues that current health disparities represent an unrepaired historical injustice that requires more than incremental reform—instead calling for a comprehensive reparations framework that addresses both the root causes and continuing manifestations of racial health inequality. Her proposed solution involves equitable rather than merely compensatory reparations, including transformative healthcare civil rights legislation designed to repair, not just acknowledge, centuries of harm to Black health and wellbeing.

Biography

Vernellia Randall is Professor Emerita of Law at the University of Dayton School of Law. She is the founder and editor of Race, Racism and the Law. Professor Randall is a recipient of the Chairman’s Award from the Ohio Commission on Minority Health and has been honored by a Commendation from the Ohio House of Representatives. Randall is an accomplished webmaster and has received awards for her website development. Some of her sites include: “Race, Health Care and the Law” and “Gender and the Law”.

Recommended Readings

Vernellia Randall, Dying While Black (2006).

#Racism #Segregation #Black #Health #Inequality

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The complex history of slavery within Islamic legal traditions spans from pre-Islamic times through the nineteenth century, revealing how religious law intersected with economic and social systems that perpetuated human bondage across centuries and cultures. This comprehensive examination of Islamic jurisprudence demonstrates how Western abolitionist efforts, while well-intentioned, ultimately failed to address the theological and legal foundations that allowed slavery to persist within Muslim societies, rendering the notion of abolition nothing more than a cruel illusion.

Join host Sahar Aziz and Professor Bernard Freamon as they explore the groundbreaking legal history detailed in his book "Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures." The contemporary revival of slavery by extremist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram represents a disturbing exploitation of these historical legal precedents, highlighting how ancient justifications for human trafficking and enslavement continue to find expression in modern conflicts. This legal and historical analysis reveals the urgent necessity for Islamic scholars and communities to confront their own juridical traditions and achieve true abolition through internal reform rather than external pressure.

Biography:

Professor Freamon is Professor of Law Emeritus at Seton Hall Law School and Professor of Law at Roger Williams University School of Law. Professor Freamon has taught Islamic Jurisprudence at New York University School of Law and brings his unique perspective as an African-American Muslim scholar to examine slavery's persistence within Islamic legal frameworks.

Professor Bernard Freamon founded Seton Hall's Center for Social Justice, litigating civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, and representing underrepresented persons in constitutional law matters involving religious minorities, prisoners, and criminal defendants. Through his innovative teaching approach, including courses on slavery and human trafficking based in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and his recent election as co-chairperson of the Bristol Middle Passage Port Marker Project, Professor Freamon demonstrates how historical scholarship intersects with contemporary justice advocacy to address both past wrongs and present-day human trafficking challenges.

Recommended Reading:

Bernard Freamon, Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures (Brill 2019)

#Islam #IslamicLaw #Slavery #Abolition #MiddleEast #SouthAsia

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Opportunity hoarding occurs when advantaged groups secure and monopolize valuable resources—such as high-quality education, exclusive networks, or prime housing—to benefit their own members while restricting access for others. This behavior creates and sustains categorical inequality, often manifesting through exclusionary zoning, preferential hiring, or hoarding educational opportunities.

Advantage groups create exclusive networks, secure resources, and develop practices (like exclusionary zoning or elite school networks) that protect their advantages. Such opportunity hoarding contributes significantly to the widening gap between high- and low-opportunity neighborhoods and schools.

Join host Professor Sahar Aziz in conversation with Professor Sheryll Cashin about her groundbreaking book White Spaces, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding in the Age of Inequality.

Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Professor Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order.

Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.

Recommended Reading:

Sheryll Cashin, White Spaces, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding in the Age of Inequality (2021)

Sheryll Cashin, Brown v. Board of Education: Enduring Caste and American Betrayal, 4 Am. J. Law & Equality 141 (2024)

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On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel coordinated an unprovoked military attack on the sovereign state of Iran without any credible evidence of an imminent threat posed by Iran or a United Nations Security Council Resolution. On that first day of the war, the Israelis killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials, immediately transforming their attacks into a regional war. Iran invoked its right to self-defense under international law by launching missiles, drones and proxy attacks against U.S. and Israeli targets in the Persian Gulf and in Israel.

On March 2, 2026, Hezbollah entered the war by attacking Israel in response Ali Khameini’s killing, which has led to a major Israeli air and ground escalation in Lebanon. Also on March 2, 2026, the Iranian government effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, which cuts off the 20% of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas from the global economy.

In this episode, Professor Juan Cole and Professor Mojtaba Mahdavi critically examine the historical, political and economic origins and consequences of Israel and the United States’ war on Iran.

Guest Biographies

Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Professor Cole has written, edited or translated 21 books and authored over 100 articles and chapters. Among his recent publications are Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires (Bold Type Books, 2018) and The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Professor Cole edited the volume ' Peace Movements in Islam, and is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian. He is proprietor of the Informed Comment news and analysis site.

Mojtaba Mahdavi is a Professor of Political Science and the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author and editor of numerous works on pos-trevolutionary Iran, contemporary social movements and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa, post-Islamism and modern Islamic political thought.

#Iran #Israel #Democracy #MiddleEast

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Join host Professor Sahar Aziz in her conversation with Professor Maryam Jamshidi about the political and legal implications of Israel and the United States' unprovoked military attacks against Iran on February 28, 2026.

As Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu publicly admitted, the Israeli government has been preparing for a war to topple the Iranian regime for over 30 years. Knowing they do not possess sufficient military capacity to do it alone, Israel unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the United States to start a war of aggression against Iran under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations.

The reasons for restraint by past US administration were often the same. Iran posed no direct threat or conducted an imminent attack toward the US that legally justified an offensive war of aggression. The risk of a global economic downfall and the exorbitant price tag of a major war far outweighed the benefits of removing a hostile government. And perhaps most importantly from a military perspective, the United States had no exit strategy.

Indeed, these were the same reasons that led to the Democratic Party winning the White House in 2008 after expensive and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Republican politicians campaigned on an America First platform in the 2021 elections by explicitly rejecting wars of choice in the Middle East that cost American lives and treasure. And yet, Republican President Donald Trump violated that promise to his constituents and granted Israel its 30-year dream to start an offensive war on Iran despite no credible evidence of an imminent threat by Iran.

The result has been predictably catastrophic for the Middle East and the global economy. The war has engulfed the Gulf states, the Strait of Hormuz is closed to the 20% of global supply of oil and natural gas, energy prices are skyrocketing across the world, Tehran is being bombarded daily by Israel, over 1300 Iranians have been killed thus far, and the war is costing American taxpayers $1 billion per day.

Additional Readings:
Maryam Jamshidi (2025), A Transformational Agenda for National Security, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 2024, Article 5.

Maryam Jamshidi, Whose Security Matters, 116 AJIL Unbound (2022).

Middle East and South Asia Lectures, Center for Security, Race and Rights

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There is a dire need for an interdisciplinary examination of the human cost of occupation through the lens of daily Palestinian experience in the West Bank. This episode explores the critically acclaimed work of Nathan Thrall, whose immersive narrative provides rare insight into the lived reality of Palestinians navigating Israeli systems of control that define life under occupation. There are prefixed structural inequalities embedded in the segregated apartheid landscape of Jerusalem and the West Bank that Palestinians including those within the diaspora must face daily—displacement from ancestral lands, violence from settlers, and systematic discrimination. Thrall's Pulitzer Prize-winning book explores the personal dimensions of a conflict often discussed in abstract geopolitical terms.

Through intimate portrayals of individual Palestinians confronting institutional barriers and daily dignitary harms, his work humanizes the ancestral consequences of policies that separate communities, restrict movement, and create parallel legal systems based on ethnicity and religion.

In his conversation with Professor Sahar Aziz, Nathan Thrall shares powerful excerpts from his work that capture the apartheid conditions experienced by West Bank Palestinians who live under military occupation while neighboring Israeli settlements enjoy full rights and protection. His narrative approach moves beyond headlines and statistics to reveal the emotional and psychological toll of occupation on individuals and families caught in systems designed to maintain separation and inequality.

Join Sahar Aziz and Nathan Thrall in a conversation that offers listeners a deeper understanding of one of the world's most contested regions through the transformative lens of personal narrative and lived experience.

Recommended Reading:

Nathan Thrall,A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy(2023)

Resources on Palestine and Palestinians -RutgersCenter for Security, Race and Rights
resources/palestinefacts/

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Apartheid #ICC #HumanRights

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A central paradox has plagued and continues to plague the American right to vote: the American republic has always conditioned participation in the democratic process on an antidemocratic ideology of worthiness needed to exercise the rights of citizenship. This reality has shaped debates around the right to vote in the past and in the present and has made it more difficult for the law to embrace the rhetoric of a universal right to vote—that is, a right for all citizens to participate freely and fairly.

This is the defining dilemma of voting rights in American history. Indeed, the histories surrounding voting rights admit to the progress that was required to gain a more expansive right to vote for all American citizens, yet at the same time recognize that these rights are inherently and constantly contested. The continued contest around voting rights is ultimately attributable to this paradox.

An expert on voting rights law, Professor Atiba Ellis provides the historical, legal and political backdrop against which voting rights of racial minorities continue to be curtailed through manipulation of state laws. Professor Ellis explains how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shifted from a powerful tool for affirmatively ending racial discrimination especially against African American voters to an ineffective safeguard against rising disenfranchisement of racial minorities.

Listen to the conversation between Professor Sahar Aziz and Professor Atiba Ellis about a topic that will shape the hotly contested November 2026 mid-term elections.

Recommended Readings

Atiba R. Ellis, The Voting Rights Paradox: Ideology and Incompleteness of American Democratic Practice, 55 Georgia L. Rev. 1553 (2021)

Atiba R. Ellis, Voter Fraud as an Epistemic Crisis for the Right to Vote, 71 Mercer L. Rev. 757 (2020).

Atiba R. Ellis, Tiered Personhood and the Excluded Voter, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 463 (2015).

Sahar F. Aziz, The Blinding Color of Race: Elections and Democracy in the Post-Shelby County Era, 17 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 182 (2015).

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