During the spring of 2011, David M. Crowe, professor of legal history at Elon Law and professor of history at Elon University, presented research at symposia around the country on topics including cultural genocide in Tibet, the application of the American Civil Rights Movement to civil rights advocacy for the Roma of Eastern Europe and Russia, and the evolution of the laws of war. Crowe is the author of Crimes of State, Past and Present: Government-Sponsored Atrocities and International Legal Responses (Routledge, 2010). He taught a winter-term course in January at Elon Law titled War Crimes, Genocide and Justice.
In January 2011, Crowe was invited to the 50th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Association for Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At that meeting, Crowe present a paper addressing the question of Cultural Genocide in Tibet, first raised by the International Commission of Jurists in 1960. More specifically, Crowe’s paper analyzed the question of cultural genocide in Tibet both from the perspective of Raphael Lemkin’s definition, which he laid out in his classic, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) and current international law.
In March 2011, Crowe participated in a Symposium on Racial Persecution and the Assault on Human Dignity hosted by North Carolina A & T University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In Crowe’s paper, he explored whether the American Civil Rights Movement can be a useful model for similar activism for the Roma throughout Eastern Europe and Russia. Furthermore, his paper explored the pathway of the civil rights movement, looking particularly at the work and message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In April 2011, Crowe presented through a forum entitled, The Evolution of the Laws of War to 1914: Theory and Practice, at the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities hosted by Columbia University. His paper explored the history of the evolution of the laws of war (laws of armed conflict), from roots in antiquity through the outbreak of World War I. The research for this paper was drawn from the works of Grotius, Wolff, Vattel, and Francis Lieber, who compiled the first unified body of the laws of war in 1863 for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
From January to March 2011, Crowe served as expert witness for a case involving a Serbian Roma (Gypsy) who was convicted of murder in 1994 and sentenced to death. Crowe was asked by the Law Office of the Federal Public Defender in Las Vegas, Nevada to study the detailed case file based on the fact that local prosecutors in the case had failed to provide, particularly in the sentencing phase of this case, the basic ABA and Nevada state bar guidelines for death penalty cases. Crowe’s research indicated that, given his ethnicity and associated problems, the defendant’s case was badly mishandled from the moment of his arrest until his conviction. In an affidavit, Crowe detailed among other things that no efforts were made by arresting officers or his public defenders to explore the impact of the defendant’s ethnicity on the multiple dimensions of his case. Crowe is scheduled to testify at an upcoming hearing on this matter.
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Reporting for this article contributed by Danielle Appelman, L’12.