This is a public lecture by Professor Laurel E. Fletcher, University of California Berkeley.

Abstract: 

What parts of their uncomfortable associations should universities remember, and how? Around the world, institutions of higher learning are confronting what to do with symbols of their ties to slavery, colonialism, racism and other projects antithetical to their values. Berkeley Law is about to revisit an ongoing question regarding its link with the War on Terror that has brought recurring protests since 2004: how the school should address its relationship to the “Torture Memos” of the Bush Administration and one of their principal authors and Berkeley Law professor, John Yoo. The impetus for this discussion is the decision by the new Dean of the law school to consider removing the paintings by Fernando Botero of prisoner abuse by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib. The art is a rebuke to the decision of the United States to rewrite the foundational norms of the rule of law in the pursuit of national security after 9/11. Their potential removal raises questions of memory heuristics: why the paintings are there at all, what they communicate about the past, and whether this past is worthy of commemoration. This article examines the paintings as works of public memory and offers a framework within which to analyze what the Boteros have come to mean to the law school community and their public communicative power. Understanding the Boteros as socially constructed and imbued with multiple meanings, enables us to see their representational work in greater complexity and invests the deliberation about their future as a site for shaping institutional identity and values. By grounding discussion of how the law school should reconcile with this divisive past in memory theory, the article contributes insights into broader debates about how universities should reckon with their shameful or distressing histories.

 

Biography:

Laurel E. Fletcher is Clinical Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, School of Law where she directs the International Human Rights Law Clinic. Fletcher is active in the areas of human rights, humanitarian law, international criminal justice, and transitional justice. As director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic, she utilizes an interdisciplinary, problem-based approach to human rights research, advocacy, and policy.

Fletcher has advocated on behalf of victims before international courts and tribunals, and has issued numerous human rights reports on topics ranging from sexual violence in armed conflict to human rights violations of tipped workers in the US restaurant industry. She also has conducted several empirical human rights studies, including of the impact of detention on former detainees who were held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She served as co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (2011-2015). Fletcher was selected as a Herbert Smith Freehills Visitor to the Faculty of Law in the University of Cambridge for 2019.

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