Yxta Maya Murray on Epistemic Injustice & #MeToo

Ipse Dixit

In this episode, Yxta Maya Murray, Professor of Law at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, discusses her provocative articles "'FEMA Has Been a Nightmare:' Epistemic Injustice in Puerto Rico" and "Draft of a Letter of Recommendation to the Honorable Alex Kozinski, Which I Guess I'm Not Going to Send Now." In addition to being a law professor, Murray is also an essayist and novelist, and her literary perspective deeply inflects her legal scholarship. In "FEMA Has Been a Nightmare", she uses the concept of "epistemic injustice" to show how the government's failed response to Hurricane Maria reflected not epistemic uncertainty about what Puerto Ricans needed, but rather the "testimonial injustice" of officials disbelieving or ignoring the people they were supposed to help. Building from a series of interviews, she uses "uncertainty theory" to explain the causes of the government's comically tragic failure to understand any of the needs of the people it was supposed to help. In "Draft of a Letter", Murray uses a fictional letter of recommendation to show how "hermeneutic injustice" helped spark the #MeToo movement. Typos, strikethroughs, and comments fracture the text, expressing the refusal to be silenced in the form of narrative irruptions. You can read more of Murray's work on her SSRN page. As an aside, I cannot recommend her articles more highly, they are subtle, thought-provoking, and delightfully fun to read.

Keywords: Administrative Law, Civil Rights and Discrimination, Constitutional Law, Disaster Law Commons, Law and Politics, Legal Theory

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