As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian sentiments and incidents of violence have surged around the country. AAPI advocates have criticized social and political responses to anti-AAPI violence and the minimal recognition of these incidents as hate crimes. In the wake of the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that left eight individuals dead—six of whom were Asian-American women, Americans are once again asking a tragically familiar question: When is a mass shooting legally considered a hate crime in the U.S.? And what difference does this label make?

In this podcast, we speak with Manjusha P. Kulkarni, a racial justice attorney and an activist who has worked on behalf of communities of color for over twenty years. In March of 2020, she and the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council helped found the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center to combat the rise in anti-Asian American racism. Today, Kulkarni discusses the legal underpinnings of hate crime prosecution with the Harvard Undergraduate Law Review.

This podcast discusses the issue of homelessness and freedom from a jurisprudence perspective. We unpack Jeremy Waldron’s controversial claim that “the homeless are free only to the extent that society is communist” and analyze whether homeless people have the same freedoms as people with homes. We talk about what would happen in the libertarian dream scenario where everything would be privately owned, and because homeless people essentially do not privately own any property, they would not be allowed to exist or perform basic human activities. In fact, rights we consider extremely important, including those listed in the Bill of Rights, can only be enjoyed if one has the freedom to exist and survive in the first place, so the constitutional freedoms of the homeless depend on how much of the land is substantively put in common.