Faculty Workshops
 
Bones of Contention: Skeletal Maturity and Criminal Responsibility in the British Empire

Bones of Contention: Skeletal Maturity and Criminal Responsibility in the British Empire

Description

Professor Binyamin Blum , of UC Hastings College of the Law San Francisco, presented a working draft of his work Bones of Contention: Skeletal Maturity and Criminal Responsibility in the British Empire. This work examines the genealogy of establishing chronological age through skeletal maturity.

Presenter

From University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, “Binyamin Blum joined the UC Hastings faculty in spring 2018. Prior to coming to Hastings Professor Blum was on the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 2012 to 2017. As a legal historian of the British Empire, Blum specializes in the relation between law and colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Blum’s current book project, Forensic Culture in the Age of Empire, focuses on the colonial origins of forensic science. Building on the observation that forensic technologies were often invented by non-scientists in the colonies, the book explores the cultural underpinnings of forensic epistemology as a new approach towards fact-finding. Stemming from perceived notions concerning native mendacity, non-cooperation and the difficulties of cross-racial identification, forensic science rendered crime scenes legible without the mediation of native eyewitnesses, thus facilitating policing across the cultural gaps of empire”.

Workshop Date

3-26-2018

Keywords

FIU Law, FIU Law Faculty Workshop Series, Professor Binyamin Blum, reliability of skeletal maturity

Disciplines

Evidence | Law | Legal History

Bones of Contention: Skeletal Maturity and Criminal Responsibility in the British Empire

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