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Systemic failures regarding the victimization of marginalized people and the institutional inability to respond to these failures is nothing new.   Sexual violence against women has a massive attrition rate for reporting, investigation, prosecution, civil litigation, and verdicts, which has resulted in women’s increased exposure to sexual harassment and assault.  Police violence disproportionately occurs against people of color, and, when reported, rarely results in sanctions or convictions.  Two movements respond to these realities.  The #MeToo movement calls upon the legal system to hold perpetrators of sexual violence responsible for their actions.  The Black Lives Matter Movement demands, not only an end to police violence, but also a significant change in how the legal system interacts with individuals of color, including those accused of crimes.  BLM calls for more restraint, limiting law enforcement budgets, and rethinking criminal liability.  At first glance, these two movements appear to be in tension.  One calls for increased state action and criminal accountability, the other for less state action and more limited law enforcement powers.  Professor Graw Leary offers a framework for coexistence and advancement of their shared priorities. 

Mary Graw Leary, Professor of Law

Professor Leary is a national and international expert in criminal law and procedure, victimization, exploitation, human trafficking, missing persons, technology, and Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) law and teaches related courses.  She is the lead author of Perspectives on Missing Persons Cases (Carolina Academic Press).  She has testified before the Senate and House and currently is Chair of the Victim Advisory Group for the United States Sentencing Commission.  Prior to joining the CUA faculty, Professor Leary was a federal and state prosecutor and worked primarily on abuse and exploitation of children and women, child pornography, sex trafficking, and family violence cases.

Commenter: dr hab. Aleksandra Kustra-Rogatka (IBTSLP 2004), Faculty of Law, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland

Aleksandra Kustra-Rogatka holds doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in law.  She is a University Professor of Law at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where she has taught in the Chair of Constitutional Law and headed the Department of Theory of Law and the State.  Her scholarly topics include non-governmental organizations dealing with democracy and rule of law, European integration on constitutional law, Polish judicial review, transitional justice, and rule of law in Europe.  From 2008 to 2017, she was a Law Clerk at the Polish Constitutional Court.  She has been a Visiting Researcher at prestigious universities in Göttingen, Germany, Berlin, and Rome as well as engaging in cooperative projects with universities in a number of other countries.  Recently she has been an Academic Fellow of re:constitution, a program of the Forum for Transregional Studies and Democracy Reporting International coordinated from Humboldt University in Berlin.  She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Comparative Law Review as well as an article reviewer for other distinguished journals and a member of preeminent scholarly associations in philosophy of law and constitutional law. She participated in the CUA-JU International Business and Trade Summer Law Program in 2004.