Note: our comment to Ashok Rao’s recent post was revised and expanded on 26 May.

We are reblogging Ashok Rao’s execellent post “The Method of Reparations” (see below) on the issue of racial reparations. Ashok’s critique of “the vigilante law enforcement system that is local and state police” is especially on point. Also disgraceful is how few of my fellow law professors (myself included) have said or done anything to shed some light (for our students as well as for the public at large) on the large-scale and ongoing injustice that is the “war on drugs,” resulting in the mass incarceration of racial minorities. (By the way, perhaps we should also consider a reparations program for persons convicted of drug crimes, which, after all, are victimless, consensual “crimes.”) Instead, many of my fellow law professors perpetuate the drug-war status quo through our deafening silence or utter indifference … Why do law professors refuse to update our priors on this issue? Are we (collectively) part of the unjust and racially-discriminatory drug-war problem, and not the solution?