Harvard University Press Blog

Is Postal Banking Coming?

United States Senator for New York Kirsten Gillibrand has just introduced major new legislation to create a Postal Bank, which would establish a retail bank in all of the U.S. Postal Service’s 30,000 locations. As detailed by the Senator’s announcement, the Postal Bank “would effectively end predatory payday lending industry practices overnight by giving low-income Americans, particularly communities of color and rural communities, access to basic banking services that they currently don’t have. The lack of access to traditional banking services makes it nearly impossible for low-income Americans to escape the cycle of poverty because they are often forced to spend large percentages of their income to cash their paychecks or pay back high-interest predatory payday loans.”

Mehrsa Baradaran, author of How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation and the Threat to Democracy, has worked closely on this issue with both Gillibrand and Senator Elizabeth Warren. As Baradaran details in Gillibrand’s announcement, postal banking was once a great service to the American people, and can be so again:

Postal banking was America’s most successful experiment in financial inclusion. Today, there are many communities across the country that are banking deserts. The only financial service providers are fringe lenders and check cashers whose business model relies on the poor paying more for banking services than anyone else. This is a threat to our democracy. Yet post offices serve all of these communities regardless of cost and without exploitation. Postal banking can provide safe, accessible, and much-needed financial services to the most struggling communities in our country. It will make it less expensive to be poor.

Below, Baradaran details the predations of the fringe lending industry and the promise of postal banking:

Facebook Interruptus

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.

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The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.

In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.

If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.

And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.

The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.   

Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.  

The Rule of Code vs. The Rule of Law

Many compare the emergence of the blockchain to the arrival of the internet, and anticipate a corresponding transformation in communications, business, and individual freedoms. In Blockchain and the Law, new this month, Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright examine both the profound opportunities the technology presents and the legal and even ethical challenges it poses. In the brief excerpt below, they consider possible paths away from our current crossroads between the rule of code and the rule of law.

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When Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin to the world, he had a clear idea in mind, which was reflected in the message he included in Bitcoin’s genesis block:

The Times 03 / Jan / 2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Nakamoto released the Bitcoin network in the middle of a financial crisis, as a reaction to an unstable international banking system. In doing so, he gave birth to a new currency—one controlled not by any government or central bank but only by cryptography and code.

As a global and decentralized payment system that operates without centralized control, Bitcoin held out the hope of newfound economic freedom for those dubious of governmental authority. Early Bitcoin adopters subscribed to the notion of vires in numeris (strength in numbers), a motto emphasizing the fact that, when it comes to money, only math can be trusted.

But Bitcoin was only the first step in a much grander vision. Shortly after Bitcoin’s release, technologists began to realize that the true potential of Bitcoin—the real innovation—was its underlying data structure: a blockchain. While Bitcoin offered the ability to replace the role of central banks and eliminate the need for financial institutions, blockchain technology could be applied more generally to reduce the need for middlemen in many sectors of the economy. Whenever a trusted authority is necessary to coordinate social or economic activity, blockchain technology could provide the necessary infrastructure to replace this activity. The roles of banks, financial institutions, stock exchanges, clearinghouses, content providers, online operators, and even governmental systems could all be modeled by a set of protocols and code-based rules deployed on top of a blockchain-based network.

Blockchain technology presents some risks, however. The technology supports technological systems and decentralized applications that operate independently of any centralized institution or trusted authority. They implement their own internal systems of rules, which often ignore or attempt to circumvent traditional systems of control. Unlike other technological constructs currently deployed on the Internet, these decentralized systems and applications can be governed almost exclusively by the rules of code.

The Internet had already raised a fundamental tension between the rule of law, based on geographical boundaries, and the rule of code, based on topological constructs. The regulation of “cyberspace” lies at the intersection between these two normative systems—which can either cooperate or compete with one another, depending on the circumstances at hand.

At the outset, legal scholars thought that the rule of code would ultimately prevail on the Internet. With code, people could implement their own systems of rules, enforced by a technological construct that operates outside of any legal jurisdiction. This is what inspired a number of technology activists to believe that cyberspace was an unregulatable space that governments did not have the right or ability to control—as opposed to the “meat space,” which is mostly governed by the rule of law.

Eager to bypass the politics of enclosure and control enacted by governments and corporations, these groups believed that the Internet would foster new normative systems, which would facilitate the free flow of information and promote political and cultural autonomy. The Internet marked the beginning of a new paradigm for regulation—one where regulation would be applied through the rule of code, with power dynamics that differed significantly from those of the physical world. Over time, however, governments recognized and embraced the potential for the rule of code to maintain the rule of law on the Internet. Governments have extended their control by requiring that intermediaries change their code to maintain and respect jurisdictional laws.

With the advent of Bitcoin and blockchain technology more generally, we are poised to witness a new wave of decentralization and new calls that the world will—once again—be governed by the rule of code. Echoes of the first Internet wave permeate the discourse around blockchains, with claims that blockchain technology will lead to greater individual freedom and emancipation, as these early technology advocates initially aspired to. Blockchain technology is viewed as a new opportunity by many cypherpunks and decentralization advocates, who see it as a new means for people to liberate themselves from the tyranny of governments and corporations—in ways that are quite reminiscent of the Internet’s early days.

Social Media and Scholarship (and Impeachment)

On November 10th 2016, it was reported that Google searches for “How to impeach a president” had increased by 4,850%. Fast forward a year, and impeachment is still frequently discussed—and still widely misunderstood. And so last week we published Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, by Harvard’s Cass Sunstein. An urgent addition to our fall list, the book provides an essential guide to what every American should know, and answers important questions like “who impeaches the President?”, “does impeachment mean the president has to leave office?”, and “is impeachment a criminal proceeding?”

This University Press Week we’re joining our sister presses in considering how our publications can cut through the noise and provide the facts. And, just as discussion of impeachment has swirled on social media, social media can help spread word of an important work of scholarship intended to ensure that the swirl’s better informed. Below, alongside a video of Sunstein produced by the virally-minded Big Think, Sunstein’s editor Thomas LeBien writes of the necessity of publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

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For the purposes of this post, you could translate the subtitle of Cass Sunstein’s latest book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, as follows: Social Media Doesn’t Contribute to Anything—You Do. Probably there is no one better than a university press editor to remind everyone that, in sentences, subjects and objects matter. Just as it does for citizens in a republic, it matters a great deal if you imagine that social media acts on you and not the other way around. Put differently, I am less focused on whether social media has contributed to the success of a university press initiative than I am on whether thousands upon thousands of individuals have used social media to help spread word of important new scholarship. And that has very much been our hope in publishing Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Here’s a useful irony. Sunstein has done more than his share of scholarly work to focus the world’s attention on nudges, choice architecture, and the dangers of Internet cyber cascades that encourage each of us to live in a news bubble of the like-minded. Here again, the subtitle to Sunstein’s current book is important. Impeachment isn’t a book aimed at just some citizens—for subsets of people who spend time on Twitter and Facebook loathing or lauding a president or political party. It hopes to inform citizens collectively. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein wrote the book without so much as mentioning the current president. It was with this hope in mind that Sunstein did not write a book pitched at impeaching someone, but rather wrote a book pitched at guiding American citizens through the Constitutional impeachment mechanism and how it works.

This means, when it comes to social media, that this book should serve as a useful guide for anyone, on any point of the opinion spectrum, thinking about whether and how (and how not) to impeach a president. And therein lies the most vaunted hope. Commercial publishers have become ever more skilled at using social media to toss chum to the like-minded. University press publishers, guided by their non-profit mission, aim to allow readers to use social media for a different purpose. Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide came to be because there was a crying need for authoritative expertise on impeachment. If, as some of Sunstein’s prior scholarship suggests, social media is a vast echo chamber of divisive opinion, then it matters—especially for those of us working to disseminate scholarly insights—that some of those opinions are better informed.

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Head on over to the blogs of Johns Hopkins University Press, Athabasca University Press, and Beacon Press for a few more thoughts on social media and scholarship, or check out a list of everything offered up on the 2017 University Press Week Blog Tour.

The Problem with Privatization

“I’m going to get good contractors and push the hell out of them,” said Donald Trump. Though the sentiment jibes with any number of declarations made on the campaign trail and since taking office, the exact quote actually dates from 1986, when Trump was making a push to take charge of work to revive a moribund Central Park skating rink. Placed alongside words from James Madison and James Landis, FDR’s SEC chairman, that Trump quote now rounds out an absurdist trio of epigraphs employed by legal scholar Jon D. Michaels in a new book on the pitfalls of privatizing government.

While the book, Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic, considers the full range of governmental functions susceptible to privatization, in an L.A. Times piece earlier this summer Michaels warned of the particular dangers of privatizing the American military. In response to reports that Jared Kushner and the now-banished Steve Bannon had turned to contractors including Blackwater founder Erik Prince for help with Afghanistan, Michaels recounted the “fiscal, operational, and diplomatic headaches” that the likes of Prince have wrought, asking how Kushner and Bannon could’ve “forgotten all the ways in which an outsourced war is a perniciously unaccountable one, divorced from our democratic military and its long-inculcated values and commitments?” Whenever the book on the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is finally written, he continued, “one deeply unsettling chapter will tell the sorry tale of America’s injudicious revival of the private military industry.”

Then last week, as if on cue, Prince took to the op-ed page of the New York Times to publicly make the case for his company’s enduring value to America’s longest war:

My proposal is for a sustainable footprint of 2,000 American Special Operations and support personnel, as well as a contractor force of less than 6,000 (far less than the 26,000 in country now). This team would provide a support structure for the Afghans, allowing the United States’ conventional forces to return home.

This plan would use former Special Operations veterans as contractors who would live, train and patrol alongside their Afghan counterparts at the lowest company and battalion levels—where it matters most. American veterans, whose extraordinary knowledge and experience could be vital to Afghan success on the ground, would serve as adjuncts to the Afghan Army and would perform in strict conformity with Afghan rules of engagement, eliminating the stigma of a foreign occupying force. Supplemental Afghan air power, flown with Afghan markings, would include a contractor safety pilot, but only the onboard Afghan officer would make weapons decisions. All contracted personnel would be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, just as active-duty American troops are now.

If the president pursues this third path, I, too, would vigorously compete to implement a plan that saves American lives, costs less than 20 percent of current spending and saves American taxpayers more than $40 billion a year. Just as no one criticizes Elon Musk because his company SpaceX helps supply American astronauts, no one should criticize a private company—mine or anyone else’s—for helping us end this ugly multigenerational war.

In the face of Prince’s proposal, we turn back to Michaels and Constitutional Coup, in which he argues that the State cannot be separated from its people, practices, and infrastructure without doing considerable violence to our constitutional order. From the book:

Roger B. Taney, Slavery’s Great Chief Justice

Included among the Confederate statues whose removal has provided white supremacists with thin cover to parade hatred in the feeble guise of heritage have been several monuments to U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Most remembered for his painfully racist and staunchly proslavery opinion in 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford, Taney is one of three Supreme Court Justices whom legal scholar Paul Finkelman considers in his forthcoming Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. Placing Taney alongside Chief Justice John Marshall and Associate Justice Joseph Story, Finkelman documents how this trio—whom he calls the most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War—repeatedly upheld the institution of slavery.

From Finkelman:

These jurists almost always failed to consider liberty or justice in cases involving slavery and race. To the contrary, with only a few exceptions in their many years on the bench, they continuously strengthened slavery in the American constitutional order. They cast opposition to slavery as unpatriotic, undermined the possibility of a political solution to America’s “peculiar institution,” and helped set the stage for the final antebellum crisis that ultimately led to secession, the Civil War, and the death of some 630,000 young Americans. Out of that carnage came an end to slavery and what Abraham Lincoln called “a New Birth of Freedom.” But this outcome would surely have surprised these justices, and at least two of them—the two chief justices, John Marshall and Roger B. Taney—probably would have found this outcome outrageous and wrong. They certainly would have emphatically opposed the post-war constitutional amendments making blacks citizens of the United States and giving them the right to vote on the same basis as whites.

Taney, whom Finkelman calls “Slavery’s Great Chief Justice,” of course left no room for doubt as to his position. His assertion in his Dred Scott opinion that black Americans, even when free, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” shocked many Americans even in 1857. But, as Finkelman shows, this most memorable case was neither the first nor the last time Taney expressed the view that the U.S. Constitution simply didn’t apply to black people. In 1832, as Andrew Jackson’s attorney general, Taney told the president that blacks in the United States had only those rights which they were able to “enjoy” at the “sufferance” and “mercy” of whites, and that blacks, “even when free,” were a “degraded class” whose “privileges” were “accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than right.” Later, during the Civil War, Taney did all he could to obstruct Lincoln’s attempts to hold the Union together, and even drafted an opinion in anticipation of an opportunity to strike down the Emancipation Proclamation.

Supreme Injustice, which stems from material prepared for the prestigious Nathan I. Huggins Lectures, has origins in Finkelman’s realization that serious consideration of slavery is often avoided in discussions of the jurisprudence of Marshall and Story, and downplayed even in the case of Taney. The role of slavery in their private lives, too, is overlooked, though Marshall and Taney were lifelong slaveowners, and the former was personally involved in buying and selling significant numbers of human beings. “Slavery does not fit comfortably in the narrative of the Supreme Court,” writes Finkelman, “but slavery does not disappear just because scholars ignore it. Support for human bondage and persistent hostility to the rights of free blacks were important components of the Court’s jurisprudence from 1801 until the Civil War.”

He continues:

The United States Supreme Court was certainly not responsible for secession or the War. But it was responsible for helping to create and nurture a culture of hostility toward liberty and justice for all, and for constantly supporting slavery. Through their jurisprudence, these justices encouraged southerners to attempt to create their own nation, based on the proposition that all men are not created equal, and that all people are not entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As emboldened white supremacists rally around Confederate statues and declare intentions to create their own “ethno-state,” it’s as clear as ever that this history hasn’t gone anywhere. But monuments to the likes of Taney need to go.

Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility

Earlier this month, De Gruyter and a number of its partner presses—of which we’re one—launched a portal to provide educational institutions with free access to a collection of books and articles across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Dubbed “Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility,” the initiative is intended to help combat false news sources, to support reflection on the nature of truth and ethics, and to encourage understanding of the struggles facing all members of society.

“Public debates surrounding immigration policy, climate change, international relations, and constitutional and human rights are currently at the forefront of the national discourse, especially, but not only, in the United States. Together, De Gruyter and its partners are keen to support a thoughtful and informed debate on these sensitive and serious issues,” said Steve Fallon, Director of De Gruyter’s Publishing Partner Program.

The collection groups resources into eight topical areas:

• Constitutional History
• Dissent, Truth & Ethics
• Environmental Studies
• Gender Studies
• Geopolitics
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Urbanism
• Islamic Studies

The content includes more than 500 books and selected journal articles from HUP, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Transcript-Verlag, and De Gruyter. HUP titles on offer include Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, and Robert Wald Sussman’s The Myth of Race, among dozens more.

Register with De Gruyter to provide access for your library.

Trump Suit Alleges Corruption

As reported by the New York Times, a group of constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers will today file a lawsuit alleging that President Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business to accept payments from foreign governments. Such payments, they argue, are in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, and they’re asking a federal court to order Trump to stop accepting them.

Among the team bringing suit is Zephyr Teachout, author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. As she shows in the book, the country was once guided by a capacious understanding of corruption along with a broad set of rules designed to avoid even the appearance of undue influence, but that understanding and those rules have been steadily replaced in recent decades by the narrow, transactional notion of quid pro quo. “The old ideas about virtue were tossed out as sentimental,” she writes, “but the old problems of corruption and government have persisted.”

As she explains in the book, the very notion of “corruption” has a unique power and place in a democracy:

In American culture, one of the social functions of a word like corrupt is to support a system of government where the love of the public and the love of country are celebrated, where citizens do not imagine themselves as solely self-interested. The word corruption is itself a bulwark against temptation, separate from any criminal penalties that may attach to it. There are constant temptations to put private interests ahead of public ones—the language of corruption provides social pressure on the other side of that equation.

President Trump himself has of course demonstrated a heightened appreciation of the power of the word, having made accusations of Hillary Clinton’s corruption a constant refrain. For his part, Eric Trump—a VP at the Trump Organization and heir, apparently, to his father’s sorrows as well as his fortune—called the suit “very, very sad.”

Small Steps Towards Truth

Historian Renee Romano’s Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders, a paperback edition of which we’ll publish this spring, investigates the ways in which reopening the cases of the civil rights era’s most infamous unsolved killings has resulted in complicated conflicts between legal and social justice. Below, she details the practical disappointments of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act to date, outlines advances written into the recently reauthorized bill, and explains why this sort of criminal justice focus still falls short of addressing a history of systemic racism.

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On December 16, 2016, in one of his last official acts as President of the United States, Barack Obama signed into law a reauthorization of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act. Originally passed in 2007, the law had been scheduled to expire in 2017. The passage of Till Bill 2, as the new law has been dubbed, reflects a long and committed effort by advocates and activists to not only extend the original act, but to push Congress and federal authorities towards a fuller accounting of the racial violence of the civil rights era and the near-complete failure of the state and federal legal system to protect black lives in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet while activists and supporters of the law (such as Syracuse University’s Cold Case Justice Initiative, the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, and Alvin Sykes) succeeded to some extent in their goal to push the government to develop a more complete record of racial violence, the new act represents just one small step towards the kind of officially sanctioned exploration of America’s violent racial history that it deserves and demands.

The original Emmett Till Act, which passed Congress almost unanimously amid great fanfare in 2007, aimed to create a government infrastructure to help coordinate and provide resources for what until then had been a relatively decentralized and ad hoc movement to revisit, and when possible prosecute, unsolved or unpunished civil rights era murders. That movement was launched in 1994, when a Mississippi state jury finally convicted Byron de la Beckwith of the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers. With this example of a successful prosecution for a decades-old civil rights murder, family members, movement activists, journalists, and academics began to lobby state and federal authorities to reopen other old civil rights murder cases. By 2008, some of the most infamous murder cases of the civil rights era had been reopened—including those of Emmett Till, the four girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, and the slaying of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964—and more than twenty men had been convicted and sentenced to jail time for their role in nine different murder cases.

The challenging nature of these investigations and the immense cost of pursuing decades-old cold cases led activists to propose the Till Bill in 2007. The law directed the FBI and the Department of Justice to coordinate the investigation and prosecution of civil rights era murders that took place before December 31, 1969. It urged federal authorities to work with state and local law enforcement to investigate and prosecute these crimes and provided up to $10 million a year for ten years to help pay the costs of pursuing cases.

Grief, Mourning, and the Politics of Memorialization

Jay D. Aronson’s Who Owns the Dead? tells the story of the recovery, identification, and memorialization of those killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. The assault came at just the moment in history when large-scale DNA identification efforts were becoming possible, and innovations in biotechnology and forensic science led NYC’s Chief Medical Examiner to pledge the identification and return of all human remains discovered in the wreckage of Ground Zero. This massive and monumentally difficult task—the largest and most costly forensic investigation in history—was undertaken not just for the victims’ families, but also for a range of social, cultural, and political reasons that have contributed to fifteen years of contention and debate both within the community of families and between families and officials responsible for finding, identifying, and memorializing the dead.

In interweaving the forensic identification effort with the vexed planning for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Aronson demonstrates America’s struggle with the fraught composite of private and public grief that’s regularly visited upon other parts of the world. His book’s closing thoughts are below.

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On the evening before the National September 11 Memorial and Museum formally opened to the public, donors and corporate supporters were fêted with a cocktail party to recognize their contributions to making the museum possible. For relatives who had labored tirelessly to ensure the creation of a museum that honored the memory of their loved ones, the party was a culmination of more than a decade of advocacy and planning. For relatives who opposed the museum plans and had worked so hard to bring victims’ remains above ground, the party was an outrage. The event added to their sense that the people who planned and financed the memorial and museum were more concerned about their own legacies than the feelings of those who lost family and friends on September 11. The dead, it seemed to some, belonged first and foremost to the powerful.

The insult of having victims’ remains stored in the basement of the museum, and the perception that those remains were being used to entice tourists to pay for entrance, was too much to bear. For Rosemary Cain, mother of firefighter George Cain, museum officials were “grave robbers” using the remains of World Trade Center victims for “greed and ego,” not to uplift the nation or provide solace to those in mourning. For Jim Riches, the presence of remains in the repository would keep him away. “I’ll never set foot in that museum,” he insisted, “until those remains are out of there and above grade on a plaza in a respectful place where it’s open to all the public to go for free.”

Thus, in the end, the situation appears to be stuck in a web of competing interests and viewpoints. One can imagine many different outcomes, but there is no simple solution to the storage of the remains of World Trade Center victims that will satisfy every one. Sites similar to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum—Srebrenica, Auschwitz, Gettysburg, Hiroshima—did not have to weigh the need to memorialize against the need to redevelop and revitalize the surroundings in the stark terms that confronted the stakeholders at the World Trade Center site. While dissenting families offered alternative locations for the storage of remains, the city dismissed them as being impractical.

Ultimately, the dispute about the storage of remains points to the fact that the new scientific identification techniques being developed in the context of the September 11 attacks and other mass fatality events are a double-edged sword. They promise, at least in theory, to eliminate the possibility of identifiable remains being left unidentified. But the same advances in identification techniques mean that remains must be cared for and kept present, both physically and in the minds of surviving relatives and society at large, until they can be identified. In her letter to 9/11 families regarding the transfer of remains to the repository, acting chief medical examiner Barbara A. Sampson, who took over from Charles Hirsch when he retired at the end of 2014, reiterated the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME)’s commitment to “do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to identify all those who lost their lives.” Thus, the remains of the World Trade Center attacks can never fully be laid to rest and become part of “the past.”