#112 In-Studio: Playing Games

What does it take to win an NBA Championship? On Monday night, June 12th, Oakland's Golden State Warriors, aka "Dub Nation" silenced the Cleveland Cavaliers to win the 2017 NBA Championship. Three days later, thousands of diverse, loyal, cheering, screaming fans filled the streets of Oakland to celebrate a victory many felt belonged as much to them, as to the players. For now at least. After 40 years homed in Oakland, the Warriors are moving across the Bay to a new arena in San Francisco.

Life of the Law goes "In-Studio" to try and sort it all out -- the controversial calls of Game 5, winning team dynamics, playing by the rules, and the gentrification of team sports.

LOTL's Osagie Obasogie, Nancy Mullane and Brittny Bottorff are joined "in-studio" at KQED by Fast Break blogger and attorney Adam Lauridsen.

Listen to #112 In-Studio: Playing Games

And...in case you missed Episode 111: NBA Champion GS Warriors vs SQ Warriors -- our feature story on the annual basketball game played between the Golden State Warriors and the San Quentin Warriors inside the prison on the lower yard, now's your chance. Listen to our post-game interview with the Warriors Draymond Green after he visits the prison cells to see first hand the inmate's living conditions.

Life of the Law co-produced the story with the amazing Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva for NPR's All Things Considered.

Adam Lauridsen joins Life of the Law Advisory Council!

For most kids, learning to play a game by the rules may be their first direct experience with law. A foul is a foul. A strike is a strike. Basketball has pretty simple rules: two teams of five players each try to score by shooting a ball through a hoop elevated 10 feet above the ground. The game is played on a rectangular floor called the court, and there is a hoop at each end... and so on. For fans watching from court side, up in the nosebleed section or on tv, it's a bit of watching the law in action.

To bring more game to the work at Life of the Law, we're thrilled to welcome Adam Lauridsen, attorney and founder of Fast Break the Golden State Warriors fan blog and an expert on the rules of the game, to LOTL's Advisory Council. Stay tuned for upcoming In-Studio Episodes with Adam, Brittny, Osagie, Tony and Kirsten!

(Pictured L to R: Nancy Mullane, LOTL Executive Producer, Adam Lauridsen, attorney and founder of Fast Break; and Brittny Bottorff, attorney and Chair of LOTL's Advisory Board.)

Congratulations to Draymond Green

2017 NBA Defensive Player of the Year!

Each year, one day in off-season, the Golden State Warriors go inside San Quentin State Prison. The players, managers and coaches meet some of the 5,000 men locked up inside the institution. They shake their hands, sign hats, and play basketball. For Warriors Draymond Green, it's a chance to sit around a metal table down on the yard surrounded by the men of San Quentin for a competitive game of dominoes.

This year, after the games were over, Green asked if he could see the prisoner's cells, to get a first-hand look at their living conditions. Walking down the first tier of North Block, an inmate offered to let Green see the inside of his cell. He ducked into the 9x4 foot cell and tried to lie down on one of the two bunks, to see what it was like. His head crunched up against the wall, his feet sticking off the end, he didn't fit. It was hot. Stuffy. Confining. Green took time to talk with the men, to show his concern.

On June 26, Draymond Green won the 2017 NBA Defensive Player of the Year.

Over the past week, Life of the Law joined hundreds of scholars from all over the world attending the Law and Society Association's Annual meeting in Mexico City. In July we'll present two special episodes on their work and their concerns about the law in society in 2017.

One scholar we met at the meeting, Sital Kalantry, just published her new book, Women's Human Rights and Migration - Sex Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India.

Kalantry's work, like that of many scholars, challenges complicated stereotypes and the role of the law in protecting the rights of individuals. According to Kalanatry, some of the most hotly contested international women's rights issues today arise from the movement of peoples from one country to another and the practices they purportedly bring with them. In her book, Women's Human Rights and Migration, Kalantry focuses on immigrants of Asian descent living in the United States who are believed to abort female fetuses because they do not want a female child. "While sex-selective abortion is a human rights concern in India, should we, for that reason, assume that the practice undermines women's equality in the United States? Although some pro-choice feminists believe that these prohibitions on sex-selective abortion promote women's equality, other feminists fiercely oppose such laws, characterizing them as a Trojan horse in the larger pursuit to overturn the reproductive rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. Nearly half of state legislatures in the United States have proposed laws restricting sex-selective abortion since 2009 and nine have adopted them."

Last week, Kalantry writes, the ACLU sued Arkansas to challenge a law that prohibits a woman from obtaining an abortion if she does not want to have a child of the predicted biological sex of the fetus. The law requires every medical professional to ask a patient seeking an abortion whether or not the patient knows the future sex of her fetus. If the patient answers in the affirmative, then the doctor cannot perform the procedure until the doctor spends "reasonable time and effort" in obtaining the patient's pregnancy-related medical records. Ten states in the U.S. will punish medical professionals for performing an abortion if they know that the patient wanted the abortion for sex-selective purposes.

2018 is the 45th Anniversary of Roe v Wade, the landmark US Supreme Court decision recognizing that the constitutional right to privacy extends to a woman’s right to make her own personal medical decisions — including the decision to have an abortion without interference from politicians. According to Planned Parenthood, Americans still stand by this decision: 7 in 10 Americans believe Roe v. Wade should remain the law of the land.

"I hope that the book contributes to changing the
prevailing narrative and also makes a contribution
to the debates within human rights and feminist theories."

- Sital Kalantry is Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and
Director of the International Human Rights Policy Advocacy Clinic

Up Next - Episode #113
Locking People Up (Part 1)

How did we become a society that locks up more than 2 million people in private and public prisons and jails? When did we design 9x4 foot cells to house two grown men? Video conferencing to replace visits? 90 to life term sentences?

This July as we celebrate our independence as a nation we'll meet up in the studios of KQED and inside the walls of San Quentin State Prison to talk about the history and the future of incarceration in America.

Locking People Up - Part 1
July 11

Resistance and Change - Part 2
July 25

(Pictured L to R: Osagie Obasogie, UC Berkeley; Ashley Rubin, University of Toronto; Keramet Reiter, UC Irvine; Troy WIlliams, Founder of San Quentin Prison Report; Rebecca McLennan, UC Berkeley; Heather Thompson, U Michigan)

"Good scholarship can nurture understanding and humane ways of engaging with one another. If we share a common commitment to admitting, 'I don't know," and to listening to one another across our differences,
we have a place to start."

- Law and Society Review
Editors: Jeannine Bell, Susan Sterett, Margot Young

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