* Professor of Law, CUNY School of Law. These remarks are an edited and slightly expanded version of the talk delivered on March 26, 1999, during the First National Meeting of the Regional People of Color Legal Scholarship Conferences, John Marshall Law School.
1 I name some of these tensions in Sharon K. Hom, “International Law Moves in a Cross-Discipline Register,” Proceedings of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) Annual Meeting (Apr. 2, 1998).
2 See generally, e.g., Sharon K. Hom, Female Infanticide in China: The Human Rights Specter and Thoughts Towards (An)other Vision, 32 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 249 (1992); Sharon K. Hom, Lexicon Dreams and Chinese Rock and Roll: Thoughts on Culture, Language, and Translation as Strategies of Resistance and Reconstruction, 53 U. Miami L. Rev. 1501 (1999); Sharon K. Hom & Robin Paul Malloy, China’s Market Economy: A Semiosis of Cross Boundary Discourse Between Law and Economics and Feminist Jurisprudence, 45 Syracuse L. Rev. 815 (1994).
3 In 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) introduced and now publishes an annual human development report ranking all countries according to their “level of development” indexed in a Human Development Index (HDI). See generally United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report (1990). The HDI has four components: productivity, equity, sustainability, and empowerment of people. See generally id.
4 See generally Charlotte Bunch & Niamh Reilly, Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights (1994); Without Reservation: The Beijing Tribunal on Accountability for Women’s Human Rights (Niamh Reilly ed., 1996).
5 The following section tracks the remarks I delivered. However, in the process of now fixing those remarks onto paper, isolated from that auditorium of law professors of color in Chicago and the energy of responsive peers and colleagues, I discovered layers of personal emotional and intellectual ambivalence and tensions as I re-read the student excerpts I had shared in the presentation. I am grateful for this opportunity to further engage some of these issues of audience, including authority of the speaking/writing voice, and to explore what creating a diverse legal discourse and community would demand from each of us.
6 Following my talk, one of my co-editors of our contracts text gently pointed out that in my whole talk I had not referenced nor presented the contracts aspect of my writing. Because the conference was following the recent release of my book Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Memoirs, Essays and Poetry, I had that book most in the foreground. But upon reflection, despite the relationship between critical teaching and scholarship, I realized I had viewed our contracts project as belonging to “teaching.” But her point is well taken, and, as an interdisciplinary intervention in a first year course, the text is also a scholarship project of which I am proud. See generally Amy Kastely, Deborah Waire Post & Sharon K. Hom, Contracting Law (1996).
7 Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Essays, Memoirs, and Poetry (Sharon K. Hom ed., 1999).
8 See id. at 141.
9 I suggest a micro-political ethics that I name “trafficking justice” in my essay, “Cross-Discipline Trafficking: What’s Justice Got to Do with It?” in Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Kandice Chuh & Karen Shimakawa eds., forthcoming 2000). At the level of micro-political struggle, I suggest that each individual can negotiate and create the community conditions, the institutions, the relationships, that are fair, non-violent, respectful, and that honor each person’s place in the multiple communities each of us belong to. At the institutional level, within our educational institutions, in the marketplace, and the workplaces inside and outside the home, each one can work to make these institutions that breathe justice. I note that I recognize these suggestions encode a valorization of substantive norms and value choices, such as peace, economic justice, and respect for the natural and human world. But one lesson that I think international human rights debates and practice underscore is that avoidance of the hard tasks of making value choices in the name of inclusiveness or cultural relativism runs the risk of masking a moral bankruptcy.
10 I especially love the Levenger catalogue, appropriately labeled “tools for serious readers,” and in which one can order personalized Post-it pads, a wonderful assortment of writing pens, writing pads, briefcases, reading and writing desks, mini-tables, as well as bookshelf furniture. You can find them on the Internet at .
11 As Joan Didion writes:
It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the pepole [sic] we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem 131, 141 (Noonday Press 1994).
12 I find reading well helps move me into an internal space for writing well. Over the years, I have accumulated a highly personalized home library of fiction, poetry, film, music, China studies, law, and social sciences that I love browsing in and returning to over and over for ideas, writing resources, and inspiration. Some excellent direct mail booksellers that regularly offer discounts between 60%–90% are Daedalus Books and Edward R. Hamilton. The Edward R. Hamilton catalogue requires patience and a love for browsing the thousands of titles in each issue, but you can even find university presses at amazing prices (many under $7.95). The shipment charge is only $3.00 for all the books you order, which really beats the university presses per book charge plus taxes. The address is Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller, Falls Village, CT 006031–5000. The Daedalus catalogue is clearly and beautifully written by devoted book lovers, and reading their thoughtful, humorous, or insightful book descriptions is sometimes almost as much fun as reading the books themselves. The shipping charge is only $4.95 per shipment. The Daedelus website address is < http://www.daedalusbooks.com>.
13 Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao: Daily Meditations (1992).