My work has twice been featured in law journals of national standing.
The article High-Tech Lynchings in An Age of Evolving Standards of Decency examines state execution by hanging through an intersectional lens. Summoning history, constitutional analysis and literature, this piece explores whether the means by which two states then implemented the death penalty were uniquely “cruel and unusual” as a matter of law. High-Tech Lynchings was published in the San Diego Justice Journal.
The article Roots, Relics and Recovery: What Went Wrong With the Abandoned Shipwreck Act focuses on an often-overlooked aspect of cultural property. As with archaeological treasures on land, so with underwater shipwrecks and their related artifacts: who should own the past? I argue that the Abandoned Shipwreck Act ignores the lessons of art law and defies the tradition of admiralty law. The piece was published in the Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts.
Roots, Relics and Recovery was also the winner of the 1994 Thomas Emerson Prize at Yale Law School.
High-Tech Lynchings in an Age of Evolving Standards of Decency
“What this town needs is a good old-fashioned lynching. The real thing. With all the trimmings. It would be like going to church. Puts things in their proper perspective. Reminding everybody of who they are, where they stand. Divides the world simple and pure. Good or bad. Oppressors and oppressed. Black or white.”
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Roots, Relics and Recovery: What Went Wrong With the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987
There is a prickly debate in the field of art law over who should own the past. Nevermind business. When the items for sale have totemic significance to a nation or culture, ownership is a privilege, not a top-dollar right… But an entire genre of artifact has been overlooked- underwater cultural property. There are some fifty thousand shipwrecks in the U.S., with 5-10% being of historic significance. As with art, so with shipwrecks and their related artifacts: who should own the past?
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Sabrina McLaughlin Smith 