Here’s another installment in RBC’s effort to foster good relations between Blue and Red Blogistan: A big hat tip to David Kopel over at the Volokh Conspiracy for bringing attention to Eric Reeves’ powerful website chronicling the Darfur Genocide.
The media is too busy covering missing women to bother with 2-3 million deaths in Darfur, but Reeves, a Smith College English professor on unpaid leave, is giving us details on a constant basis. I’ve been looking for a good update website for Darfur: SudanReeves is it.
Kopel is right to suggest that while prompt action from the west might not stop everything, it could do an awful lot of good. It’s appalling that the US pretends to support freedom and human rights, and lets the worst genocide at least since Rwanda and perhaps since the Holocaust to go on without even batting an eyelid. The Bush Administration’s opposition to the Darfur Accountability Act, co-sponsored by Republican Sam Brownback and Democrat Jon Corzine, is just one more example of its hypocrisy. And as Kopel correctly suggests, the Europeans, who piously raise human rights claims whenever it embarrasses the US, have been completely silent on the issue.
To their credit, many conservatives, and especially evangelicals, have fought the good fight on this. Thanks to Reeves for the website, and Kopel for raising its profile.
—Jonathan Zasloff
Author: Jonathan Zasloff
Jonathan Zasloff teaches Torts, Land Use, Environmental Law, Comparative Urban Planning Law, Legal History, and Public Policy Clinic - Land Use, the Environment and Local Government. He grew up and still lives in the San Fernando Valley, about which he remains immensely proud (to the mystification of his friends and colleagues). After graduating from Yale Law School, and while clerking for a federal appeals court judge in Boston, he decided to return to Los Angeles shortly after the January 1994 Northridge earthquake, reasoning that he would gladly risk tremors in order to avoid the average New England wind chill temperature of negative 55 degrees.
Professor Zasloff has a keen interest in world politics; he holds a PhD in the history of American foreign policy from Harvard and an M.Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge University. Much of his recent work concerns the influence of lawyers and legalism in US external relations, and has published articles on these subjects in the New York University Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. More generally, his recent interests focus on the response of public institutions to social problems, and the role of ideology in framing policy responses.
Professor Zasloff has long been active in state and local politics and policy. He recently co-authored an article discussing the relationship of Proposition 13 (California's landmark tax limitation initiative) and school finance reform, and served for several years as a senior policy advisor to the Speaker of California Assembly. His practice background reflects these interests: for two years, he represented welfare recipients attempting to obtain child care benefits and microbusinesses in low income areas. He then practiced for two more years at one of Los Angeles' leading public interest environmental and land use firms, challenging poorly planned development and working to expand the network of the city's urban park system. He currently serves as a member of the boards of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (a state agency charged with purchasing and protecting open space), the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice (the leading legal service firm for low-income clients in east Los Angeles), and Friends of Israel's Environment. Professor Zasloff's other major activity consists in explaining the Triangle Offense to his very patient wife, Kathy.
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