By Gideon Christian

Facial recognition technology (FRT) is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based biometric technology that utilizes computer vision to analyze facial images and identify individuals by their unique facial features. This sophisticated AI technology uses advanced computer algorithms to generate a biometric template from a facial image. The biometric template contains unique facial characteristics represented by dots, which can be used to match identical or similar images in a database for identification purposes. The biometric template is often likened to a unique facial signature for each individual.

A significant rise in the deployment of AI-based FRT has occurred in recent years across the public and private sectors of Canadian society. Within the public sector, its application encompasses law enforcement in criminal and immigration contexts, among many others. In the private sector, it has been used for tasks such as exam proctoring in educational settings, fraud prevention in the retail industry, unlocking mobile devices, sorting and tagging of digital photos, and more. The widespread use of AI facial recognition in both the public and private sectors has generated concerns regarding its potential to perpetuate and reflect historical racial biases and injustices. The emergence of terms like “the new Jim Crow” and “the new Jim Code” draws a parallel between the racial inequalities of the post-US Civil War Jim Crow era and the racial biases present in modern AI technologies. These comparisons underscore the need for a critical examination of how AI technologies, including FRT, might replicate or exacerbate systemic racial inequities and injustices of the past.

This research paper seeks to examine critical issues arising from the adoption and use of FRT by the public sector, particularly within the framework of immigration enforcement in the Canadian immigration system. It delves into recent Federal Court of Canada litigation relating to the use of the technology in refugee revocation proceedings by agencies of the Canadian government. By delving into these legal cases, the paper will explore the implications of FRT on the fairness and integrity of immigration processes, highlighting the broader ethical and legal issues associated with its use in administrative processes.

The paper begins with a concise overview of the Canadian immigration system and the administrative law principles applicable to its decision-making process. This is followed by an examination of the history of integrating AI technologies into the immigration process more broadly. Focusing specifically on AI-based FRT, the paper will then explore the issues of racial bias associated with its use and discuss why addressing these issues is crucial for ensuring fairness in the Canadian immigration process. This discussion will lead to a critical analysis of Federal Court litigation relating to the use of FRT in refugee status revocation, further spotlighting the evidence of racial bias in the technology's deployment within the immigration system.

The paper will then proceed to develop the parallels between racial bias evident in contemporary AI-based FRT (the “new” Jim Crow) and racial bias of the past (the “old” Jim Crow). By focusing on the Canadian immigration context, the paper seeks to uncover the subtle, yet profound ways in which AI-based FRT, despite its purported neutrality and objectivity, can reinforce racial biases of the past. Through a comprehensive analysis of current practices, judicial decisions, and the technology's deployment, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about technology and race. It challenges the assumption that technological advancements are inherently equitable, urging a re-evaluation of how these tools are designed, developed, and deployed, especially in sensitive areas such as refugee status revocation, where the stakes for fairness and equity are particularly high.

69 McGill Law Journal 441 (October 2024)

By Abigail Hean

The termination of parental rights refers to the permanent, legal severance of any rights, relationship, or privileges between a parent and child. In the age of mass incarceration in the United States, more and more parents are seeing their rights involuntarily terminated as a result of their incarceration, making it one of the gravest and yet simultaneously least-discussed collateral consequence that comes with a criminal conviction and sentence to imprisonment. For example, national data revealed that 32,000 incarcerated parents had their parental rights involuntarily terminated from 2006 to 2016, many of whom had no allegations of unfitness prior to incarceration. In fact, a parent who was incarcerated but had never been accused of child abuse or neglect was more likely to have their parental rights terminated than one who had physically or sexually abused their children.

Because of the undeniable racial and socioeconomic disparities that exist in our criminal justice system, the link between incarceration and termination of parental rights is especially concerning. On their face, child welfare laws purport to balance the interests of parents and children. However, these procedures fail to adequately protect incarcerated parents. The child welfare system disproportionately affects poor parents of color, threatening the long-term lives of their children and the stability of communities of color, while perpetuating racist and classist prejudices. To correct this problem, scholars have suggested both practical solutions and legal reforms, such as heightening the burden of proof and repealing federal legislation. However, rather than rewrite the laws, this article suggests that advocates work to reframe the idea of a child's best interests to more seriously consider the importance of family unity, especially for families of color and those of low socio-economic status.

Part I of this article will discuss the high rates of termination of parental rights among incarcerated parents and the role of race and poverty in these cases. Part II will review the laws which currently set incarcerated parents up for failure, including the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and, using Wisconsin as a case study, the state statutes which are often used against incarcerated parents. Finally, Part III will examine the false dichotomy of family unity and the child's best interest, which has been created to perpetuate racism, classism, and paternalism in our legal system, despite evidence that family unity and a child's best interests are actually interrelated. This article will then recommend a few ways for advocates and judges to reframe the idea of the child's best interests to better preserve family unity.

 45 Children's Legal Rights Journal 1 (2024)

By Abigail Sloan

Luke Stewart was twenty-three years old when he was killed for being a Black man asleep in his car. Luke was legally parked near a friend’s house in the Cleveland suburbs when two men woke him by knocking on his window. One of the men opened the door to Luke’s car and attempted to forcibly remove him by his head; the second man leaped into Luke’s car and began attacking him. Out of fear, Luke attempted to drive away, but within about one minute, the second man punched Luke, stunned him with a taser six times, and then struck him in the head before shooting him five times, killing him. The two attackers were police officers who never identified themselves to Luke––who was unarmed and did not pose a threat to them. As if Luke’s killing is not tragic enough, when a civil rights lawsuit was filed in response to his death, it was dismissed because of the doctrine of qualified immunity. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that even though a jury could find that the officer’s decision to shoot Luke had violated his constitutional rights, and that “the use of deadly force was unreasonable,” the officer could not be held liable. Qualified immunity holds officers liable only in situations where they have violated someone’s clearly established rights, and because a case with these exact facts has never been considered in court, the right for Luke to not be killed while asleep in his car had not been “clearly established.” The police department did not discipline the officer for his actions, and he was completely shielded from civil liability. Luke’s mother, who filed the lawsuit on his behalf, attempted to appeal the Sixth Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court, but the Court declined to take the case, meaning Luke and his family will never see justice. Police officers’ use of deadly and excessive force leads to the violent, public, and horrific killing of thousands of Black men, women, and children––Luke’s story is far from unique. The reality is that Luke became yet another victim of a violent and oppressive American regime that has failed to rectify hundreds of years of calculated attacks on Black lives—Luke was lynched. Today’s perpetrators are not the same masses of self-appointed vigilantes, but rather they are police officers who hide behind their badges and the ever-powerful blanket of qualified immunity. Lynchings no longer resemble mobs hanging Black men and women from trees, but they continue to remain a violent act of terror against Black Americans.

37 Journal of Civil Rights & Economic Development 49 (Fall, 2024)

College campuses across the country celebrate their legacies of creating free speech guarantees following student protests from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, even though colleges had minimal tolerance of such protests at the time. As part of the New Left’s vision for a different society, students, sometimes joined by faculty, demanded an end to the Vietnam War and war industry research, fought for Black and ethnic studies departments, and protested urban renewal plans that displaced Black working-class communities. We are experiencing another transformative moment. Lawmakers and other stakeholders pressure university administrators to act against students or face funding cuts. Police repression follows, escalating into violence. Universities create or enlarge their own police or security forces in response, while also expanding codes of conduct to quash disruptive protest activity. This Symposium Piece traces the throughlines between university responses in the past and today. This Piece also provides three features of policing campus protests. First, campus police and administrators engage in political surveillance, monitoring the political activity of the campus community, which enables universities to sanction students and faculty through campus codes of conduct and refer them for criminal prosecution. Second, police and administrators network with local and federal law enforcement agencies to share information. Third, police act formally and informally as part of the disciplinary process within universities to sanction and control protests. This Piece ends with contemporary and historic examples of university leaders who have avoided police repression as a response to student dissent and instead chosen negotiation. 

Colum. L. Rev. 1277 (2025); UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 25-34

By Rebecca E. Zeitlow

The United States Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health overruled decades of reproduction rights protections, established in Roe v. Wade. Dobbs has resulted in a new legal landscape, where the scope of people’s ability to exercise reproductive autonomy depends on the state in which they live, and their ability to travel across state borders. Without the precedent of Roe to stop them, states have begun enacting severe restrictions on abortion rights. People seeking reproductive rights today will play a leading role in shaping those rights, not by filing lawsuits but through their “ordinary acts,” crossing state borders in search of abortions. This post-Dobbs landscape is reminiscent of the pre-Civil War era, when fugitives from slavery crossed state borders in search of their freedom. Fugitives from slavery could not have succeeded without the help of their allies on the ground, who engaged in civil disobedience and provided clandestine support, aiding fugitives in their travels through the Underground Railroad.  People seeking abortions, like fugitives from slavery before them, are engaged in what I call “transgressive constitutionalism,” making rights claims with their bodies and their actions. Like fugitives from slavery, people seeking abortions are transgressing not only state borders, but also the line between legality and illegality, to enforce a constitution of liberation, bodily autonomy, freedom of movement, and freedom of expression.  

5 N.C. CVL. RTS. L. REV. 105 (2025). 

By Rebecca E. Zietlow 

In 1852, Martin Delany, a free Black doctor, journalist, and antislavery activist wrote an influential treatise on the rights of free Black people in which he claimed, “We are Americans having a birthright citizenship….”   Ten years later, during the Civil War, Delany backed his words with actions by volunteering for the Union Army and recruiting Black soldiers for an army regiment.   Delany’s theory of birthright citizenship was shared by thousands of antislavery and Black civil rights activists in the antebellum era, including William Yates, who wrote the first treatise on the rights of free Black people in 1838, and Frederick Douglass, a fugitive from slavery who became one of the most prominent abolitionist leaders.   Black activists used the language of citizenship to claim their status as rights-bearing people who belonged to the community in which they live and to the national polity.  Fugitives from slavery crossed state borders in search of freedom and human rights. Their free Black allies argued that they were citizens by virtue of being born in the United States and, as citizens, were entitled to human rights. Free Black people emphasized their loyalty to the national polity and their willingness to sacrifice to prove their loyalty.  During the Civil War, fugitives from slavery and free Black people volunteered to serve in the Union army, risking their lives in support of the polity and proving their loyalty and eligibility for citizenship rights.  This Essay explores the origins of birthright citizenship and describes the centrality of citizenship rights in the advocacy of people, like Delany, who participated in the Free Black Civil Rights Movement and Antislavery Movement. Birthright citizenship is a promise of equality for all people who are born in the United States, regardless of their race or the national origin of their parents. It is in our Constitution today because of the advocacy of people who were brought involuntarily into our country and claimed their right to citizenship with their actions and their activism.

94 Mississippi Law Journal, 1425-2025

By Lauren E. Bartlett

For over a decade, international human rights mechanisms have been calling for the prohibition of the detention of children based solely on immigration status. Human rights experts agree that the detention of children for immigration purposes is never in the best interests of the child, it leads to long-term harm, and it is a clear human rights violation. Yet, the United States continues to detain hundreds of thousands of migrant children each year the U.S. government still tries to justify its inhumane practices. This article argues that engaging with international human rights mechanisms on this topic, including during the upcoming Universal Periodic Review of the United States by the U.N. Human Rights Council in November 2025, is a small and relatively low stakes step to help forge a path towards the abolition of the immigration detention of children in the United States.

UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO LAW REVIEW, VOL. 59, NO. 3 , 2025.

By Elizabeth Choo

Politicians justify U.S. immigration laws and policies by claiming that harsh immigration enforcement will deter unauthorized migrants. This Article demonstrates that migrant decision-making in practice undermines common assumptions underlying how immigration deterrence is expected to operate. By highlighting research demonstrating that immigration law does not have a significant deterrent effect, this Article invites scholars and activists to challenge the use of deterrence logic as a façade to legitimate cruelty towards migrants, especially as that cruelty disproportionately affects migrants of color. This Article recommends decriminalizing unauthorized entry and reentry and ending civil immigration detention as initial steps in creating a fairer and more just future outside the confines of deterrence logic.

  N.Y.U. REVIEW OF LAW & SOCIAL CHANGE [Vol. 48:161, 2025.

By Sarah J Summers.

From the introduction:

Sentencing law and theory is closely bound up with the justification of punishment. 1 It is thus unsurprising that sentencing theory is generally perceived as falling squarely within the domain of moral philosophy. 2 Much of the debate has focused on whether retribution or consequentialist notions of deterrence or rehabilitation should serve as the principal aim on which the sentencing system is based. There are numerous articles by proponents of the various theories explaining why their theory should provide the primary basis for the determination of the sentence. 3 The importance of the moral philosophical discussion transcends national boundaries. Despite considerable diversity in the legal cultures and traditions of the various legal systems, ‘[p]rinciples of uniformity and retributive proportionality are now recognised to some extent in almost all systems, but sentences in these systems are also designed to prevent crime by means of deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation’.4 Whereas broadly ‘correctionalist’ accounts of punishment underpinned the penal welfare model of punishment for much of the twentieth century, 5 the ‘just deserts’ movement 6 of the 1980s was in line with a transfer of focus away from the individualized treatment of offenders and towards a vision of punishment which not only favoured a more standardized approach to the treatment of offenders, but which also expressly legitimized retributivist penalties and practices…..

London Oxford. 2022. 280p.

By Susanne Schwarz

The end of the Civil War brought freedom to 3.9 million formerly enslaved people. Yet, almost immediately following the war, Southern states started to incarcerate freedpeople at unprecedented rates in an effort to reinstate racial hierarchies in the post-Emancipation era. Not before long, Southern states introduced new carceral institutions, most notably the convict-lease system, under which prisoners were leased out as laborers to private contractors for the duration of their sentence. The emergence of convict leasing has often been portrayed as a programmatic attempt by the Southern whites to find an alternative to antebellum chattel slavery. Paying special attention to the sequencing of political events during Reconstruction, I revisit this story by highlighting the role that state capacity and public finance played in the introduction of the policy. As conviction numbers swelled after Emancipation, the carceral capacity of Southern penitentiaries was quickly overwhelmed, prompting Reconstruction legislatures and governors to search for alternatives to conventional imprisonment. I argue that convict leasing emerged from these capacity challenges as a cost-effective solution that initially enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Over time, leasing grew more profitable, both for the state governments and the lessees, and abolition efforts were stalled for decades, even when the system became increasingly abusive. Using a range of archival materials, I illustrate these carceral developments in an in-depth case study of the origins of convict leasing in Georgia.

Studies in American Political Development, May 2023

Bethany Jo Murray & MarySue V. Heilemann

In May 2020, Minneapolis became the epicenter of a global movement challenging entrenched anti-Blackness and police violence after the murder of George Floyd, leading to demands to defund police departments and redistribute police officers’ mental health-related responsibilities to social workers. These events foregrounded dialogue about anti-carceral social work, a nascent area of social work. While empirical studies related to anti-carceral social work are lacking, this study addresses the gap by focusing on an episode in the Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement, a community-led effort to shelter hundreds of unhoused residents displaced by the National Guard during mass protests in 2020. Using constructivist grounded theory, intensive interviews with 17 organizers and volunteers were conducted centered on crisis relief efforts to create a shelter in a hotel in Minneapolis and challenges that surfaced. Results led to development of a grounded theory: Supporting Unhoused Residents in Minneapolis 2020: A Complex Path of Disillusionment.

Journal of Community Practice, Volume 32, 2024- Issue 4

By Andrew C. Gray and Indigo Koslicki

Turner et al. examined the discussion of slavery and slave patrols within criminal justice textbooks and found a general lack of coverage. While much has changed since then, there exists an absence of coverage in a newer realm of educational materials: Open Educational Resources (OERs). While there is growing acknowledgment that textbooks should be more accessible, criminal justice OER textbooks are sparse—especially when considering their coverage of race and colonialism. We first conduct a content analysis similar to that of Turner et al. to find extant introductory criminal justice OER textbooks and determine their coverage of historic anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. We then discuss our own work in creating OER textbooks to bridge the identified gaps, with guidance to readers seeking to develop their own OER textbooks, including content development, copyright law, and considerations in light of legislation limiting the discussion of diversity, equity, and inclusion topics.

Journal of Criminal Justice Education , June 2025.

Edited by Irene Watson

For more than 500 years, Indigenous laws have been disregarded. Many appeals for their recognition under international law have been made, but have thus far failed – mainly because international law was itself shaped by colonialism. How, this volume asks, might international law be reconstructed, so that it is liberated from its colonial origins? With contributions from critical legal theory, international law, politics, philosophy and Indigenous history, this volume pursues a cross-disciplinary analysis of the international legal exclusion of Indigenous Peoples, and of its relationship to global injustice. Beyond the issue of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, however, this analysis is set within the broader context of sustainability; arguing that Indigenous laws, philosophy and knowledge are not only legally valid, but offer an essential approach to questions of ecological justice and the co-existence  of all life on earth.

Oxford; New York Routledge, 2017. 236p.

By Sara  De Vido 

Violence against women is characterised by its universality, the multiplicity of its forms, and the intersectionality of diverse kinds of discrimination against women. Great emphasis in legal analysis has been placed on sex-based discrimination; however, in investigations of violence, one aspect has been overlooked: violence may severely affect women's health and access to reproductive health, and State health policies might be a cause of violence against women. Exploring the relationship between violence against women and women's rights to health and reproductive health, Sara De Vido theorises the new concept of violence against women's health in international law using the Hippocratic paradigm, enriching human rights-based approaches to women's autonomy and reflecting on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination. At the core of the book are two dimensions of violence: horizontal 'inter-personal', and vertical 'state policies'. Investigating these dimensions through decisions made by domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies, De Vido reconceptualises States' obligations and eventually asks whether international law itself is the ultimate cause of violence against women's health.

Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 2020.

By Sabina Garahan

This book is a ground-breaking study of how the European Court of Human Rights interprets Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to liberty and security. The right to liberty is a fundamental provision that is enshrined not only in the Convention but in all major human rights treaties. Despite this, Article 5 remains both a largely underdeveloped and unexplored area of European human rights law. The work aims to fill this gap by presenting an original framework for the progressive interpretation of the right to liberty. It is argued that the Court has not made use of opportunities to evolve Article 5 standards, resulting in a weakening of protections against arbitrary detention. This book’s original framework for the progressive interpretation of Article 5 identifies and addresses gaps in the protection of vulnerable groups of detainees, including in areas of growing concern across the European human rights space. These include individuals held pre-trial, as children, in immigration detention, following protest, or as a result of their political dissent or human rights activism. The volume outlines the normative justifications for an evolutive approach to Article 5 and elaborates how a dynamic interpretation could be enacted in practice, including by reference to original interview data and insights from European Court of Human Rights judges. This book will serve as a key point of reference for anyone researching or working on detention and the right to liberty across the Council of Europe and beyond.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025. 240p.

By Peter Kempees

The European Convention on Human Rights is now crucial to decisions to be taken by the military and their political leaders in ‘hard power’ situations – that is, classical international and non-international armed conflict, belligerent occupation, peacekeeping and peace-enforcing and anti-terrorism and anti-piracy operations, but also hybrid warfare, cyber-attack and targeted assassination. Guidance is needed, therefore, on how Convention law relates to these decisions. That guidance is precisely what this book aims to offer. It focuses primarily on States’ accountability under the Convention, but also shows that human rights law, used creatively, can actually help States achieve their objectives.

Leiden: Nijhoff, 2020. 

Edited by Alice Panepinto, Bana Abuzuluf, Ahma Damara, Brendan CiarÁn Browne, Munir Nuseibah, and Triestino Marinello

This open access edited collection is the first book-length academic publication on the Palestinian Bedouins at risk of forced displacement in the Central West Bank and Greater Jerusalem area. At its core are two questions: firstly; what are the humanitarian vulnerabilities they face and how are they produced/constructed? And secondly, how does protracted impunity for international law violations drive humanitarian protection risks for them? It interweaves international law, community-based empirical research and interdisciplinary perspectives, to offer the broadest possible framework for understanding these complex and complicated questions. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 223p.

By Quah Ee Ling

Featuring stories of early settler and contemporary Asian migrant women in Asia-Pacific region, Fire Dragon Feminism discusses Asian migrant women’s encounters with coloniality and racial capitalism at their workplace and in their everyday life. Centring anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist philosophies and strategies, this open access book introduces 'fire dragon feminism' - a migrant feminist strand that aims to blow flames at colonial, racial capitalist and neoliberal structures and build solidarities for more just and sustainable futures. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Asian migrant employees in Australian universities, the book examines how Asian migrant women are implicated and complicit in white race-making projects while being subjected to racialisation and marginalisation simultaneously. Fire Dragon Feminism presents a historicised and sociological discussion of the contradictions, trade-offs, complicities and refusals in the Asian migrant women’s tales of migration, coloniality and racial capitalism. The author ends the book with a celebration of anti-colonial, anti-racist grassroots feminist activisms.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 

By Boccagni, Paolo

What does everyday life look like for young men who flee to Europe, survive, and are then assigned temporary housing? Hypersurveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance, or even nothingness? Based on four years of ethnographic research, Undoing Nothing recounts the untold story of Italian asylum seekers’ struggles to produce relevance—that is, to carve out meaning, control, and direction from their legal and existential liminality. Their ways of inhabiting space and time rest on a deeply ambivalent position: together and alone, inside and outside, absent and present. Their racialized bodies dwell in their assigned residence while their selves inhabit a suspended translocal space of moral economies, nightmares, and furtive dreams. This book illuminates a distinctly modern form of purgatory, offering both a perceptive critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth and grace. “Undoing Nothing is an exceptional book. It moves us away from dramatic and sensational descriptions of refugee predicaments and toward a detailed and perceptive analysis of the ways people navigate and manage their lives in the interstices between being stuck and in motion, surviving and aspiring.”

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2025. 228p

Edited by Adrian Di Giovanni and Luciana Bercovich

This book investigates grassroots, community-led justice strategies – known as legal empowerment – being used to promote the human rights of people living in informal settlements in the Global South. Residents of informal settlements, also known as slums or favelas, encounter a complex array of human rights violations; from systemic discrimination by public officials, to threats to physical security from forced evictions, or arbitrary arrests, to a lack of access to basic services such as housing, water, sanitation, and education. This book shows how grassroots justice organizations around the world are working with residents to defend their rights and secure more dignified living conditions. Drawing on original empirical research across 10 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the book demonstrates how legal empowerment can put residents at the centre of holistic approaches to urban development and confront exclusionary and undemocratic systems of governance. The book encompasses practical recommendations and strategies such as rights-based approaches to informality, participation, community mobilization and litigation. Bridging the gaps between the law on the books and the harsh realities of informality on the ground, this book will be an important read for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, working in realms of social and economic rights, access to justice and urban poverty and development.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025. 287p.