Litigation
Cal. Litig. 2023, Volume 35, Issue 3
Content
- California's Commitment To Wage Transparency Comes At a Cost To Employers
- Confessions From An Electronic Platform 2022: Appellate Argument
- Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements: Much Ado About Nothing
- Don't Let Your Client's Bequest Be a Lawsuit
- Editor's Foreword
- Fraud As Hyperreality
- From the Section Chair
- Governmental Entity Litigation: the Mirror Dimension
- New Federal Legislation Raises Dueling Experts: What Olean Might Mean For the Future of Class Certification In the Ninth Circuit
- PAST SECTION CHAIRS & EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
- Q & A WITH JUDGE VINCE CHHABRIA OF THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA
- SECTION OFFICERS & EDITORIAL BOARD
- Table of Contents
- The California Supreme Court In Judicial Year 2021-2022: Emerging From the Pandemic
- The Hastings College of the Law Name Change: the Real Deal About the Bad and the Ugly
- The Supreme Court's Five Arbitration Decisions
- Working: Conversations With Essential Workers
- Smashing Statues: the Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments
SMASHING STATUES: THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICA’S PUBLIC MONUMENTS
BY ERIN L. THOMPSON
Reviewed by Marc Alexander*
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, following his arrest after he was suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. A wave of protests followed Floyd’s death, and in its wake around 170 public monuments fell or were removed in one year. The protests, like the removal of monuments, drew attention to racial discrimination and disparities of power in the United States.
Focusing just on California, monument removals in recent years include highway markers for Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, as well as statues of Stonewall Jackson, Father Junipero Serra, Christopher Columbus, Queen Isabella, Avery Brundage, John Sutter, Francis Scott Key, Pete Wilson, Thomas Fallon — and, in the town of Arcata, William McKinley. Some targeted monuments were of men who enslaved human beings, fought for the Confederacy, or were imperialists. Reasons for other removals can be obscure. Removal by protesters of a bust of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco appears to overlook that General Grant fought to save the Union. A statue of Mahatma Gandhi was sawed off its base, and the head split in two.