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Abstract:
This article begins with a discussion of storytelling, setting the context for what follows: the author's own story of an affirmative-action-fueled journey through law school; law school teaching then law school publishing – to his ultimate resignation from what he calls the Vampire Law Professor existence (hence Vampires Anonymous). Most tenured law professors, he notes, are Storyhaters, preferring instead 100-page law journal articles with 400 footnotes. Indian people, on the other hand, love their story-tellers and their stories. Indian people also raise their children to think independently and act for others. The act-for-others theme makes its second appearance toward the end of the article, after Professor Williams colorfully describes how he was, temporarily, sucked into the blood-sucking, soul-draining, tenure-chasing, article-writing hell of his early professorial days. It was only after he joined Vampires Anonymous that Williams was able to “stop writing law review articles for a while and serve the needs of others in [his] community.” He accomplished this by involving both himself and his law students in Critical Race Practice. Williams concludes that as he and his students practice it, Critical Race Practice is about “learning to listen to other people’s stories and then finding ways to make these stories matter in the legal system.”

Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Practice, Affirmative Action, Law Professors

Abstract:
Williams’ article is written as the introductory piece to this volume’s symposium on Indigenous Peoples’ Claims to Self-Determination, published the year before the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first landfall in the New World. The article shows how Columbus’s racism - evidenced by the belief that indigenous peoples should not be left to govern themselves - fits squarely on the historical continuum dating back to the Crusades and continuing to the present. The Crusades were the first systematic expression of the Catholic policy of denying “infidel” peoples rights of dominion and jurisdiction over their own territories. The Pope expressed his power even over the “infidels” by virtue of his position as head of the true catholic church, which gave him universal legal dominion. Continuing in the same vein, Columbus never doubted that he could claim for Spain the lands he touched, because of the “Natives’ divergence from Christian European cultural norms of religious belief and civilization.” And hundreds of years later this same theory, operating under a different name, is first formally written into an American legal decision - Johnson v. M’Intosh. There it is presented as the “doctrine of discovery”, in which Justice Marshall notes that the “Indians lacked the same sovereign rights in the lands they occupied which Christian European recognized as belonging to other civilized nations.” Thus, writes Williams, cultural racism is firmly embedded in American law and firmly stuck in a 1000-year old legal tradition first brought to the New World by Columbus.

Doctrine of Discovery, cultural racism, Indigenous peoples, self-determination

Abstract:
My response to Blair Bower's paper on human behavior and global climate focuses on the context of human behavior as it is affected by the institutional process of the international legal system. In particular, I will focus on the institutional process of the international human rights system.

human behavior, global claim, international legal system, international human rights system