Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Black (16)
- African American (12)
- Racism (9)
- Discrimination (8)
- Fourth Circuit (5)
-
- Intersectionality (5)
- COVID (4)
- Due process (4)
- Gender (4)
- Judge Roger Gregory (4)
- Race (4)
- Abolition (3)
- Coronavirus (3)
- Disability (3)
- Equal protection (3)
- Pandemic (3)
- Policing (3)
- White supremacy (3)
- African american (2)
- African-American (2)
- CEDAW (2)
- COVID-19 (2)
- College (2)
- Disenfranchisement (2)
- Diversity (2)
- Incarceration (2)
- Jim Crow (2)
- Kimberlé Crenshaw (2)
- Law enforcement (2)
- Law school (2)
- Publication Year
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 30 of 74
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Colorblind And Color Mute: Words Unspoken In U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments, Chris Chambers Goodman
Colorblind And Color Mute: Words Unspoken In U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments, Chris Chambers Goodman
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
The U.S. Supreme Court holds oral arguments on 70 to 80 cases each year, with fewer than a dozen most years involving issues around race or ethnicity. When the salience of race is clear, Supreme Court observers would expect to hear racial terms used in the arguments by counsel, as well as in the Justice’s questions.
Surprisingly, this research study demonstrates that is not the case. These racial terms - such as color, discriminate, minority, race, and its various related terms like racial, racially, racist, as well as combinations like race-neutral, and race-blind - only sparsely appear in oral argument …
When Public Meets Private: Private School Enrollment And Segregation In Virginia, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ash Taylor-Beierl, Erica Frankenberg, April Hewko, Andrene Castro
When Public Meets Private: Private School Enrollment And Segregation In Virginia, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ash Taylor-Beierl, Erica Frankenberg, April Hewko, Andrene Castro
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Recognizing Virginia’s central role in the expansion of segregated southern private schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, we review law and policy related to private school segregation. We also conduct an empirical analysis of Virginia private school enrollment and segregation since the turn of the twenty-first century, finding uneven enrollment even as the number of private schools has grown. Segregation in the sector is deepening. As public funding for private schools rises, we make the case that the increasingly blurred lines between public and private education in Virginia are rooted in adaptive discrimination.
Battle Of The Lands: The Creation Of Land Grant Institutions And Hbcus – Fostering A Still Separate And Still Unequal Higher Education System, Jasmine Cooper
Battle Of The Lands: The Creation Of Land Grant Institutions And Hbcus – Fostering A Still Separate And Still Unequal Higher Education System, Jasmine Cooper
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
In HBCU culture, the Battle of the Bands is a competition between school marching bands to determine the “best of the best”. It is a cultural celebration that symbolizes friendly competition and showcases students’ pride in their school. Unfortunately, since their inception, Historically Black Colleges, and Universities (“HBCUs”) have been battling for legitimacy in America’s higher education system. From the beginning, HBCUs were often the only place African Americans could receive an education. Today, HBCUs are known for creating some of the most successful Black graduates and serve as a safe haven for Black students seeking an education in an …
Unshielded: How The Police Can Become Touchable, Brandon Hasbrouck
Unshielded: How The Police Can Become Touchable, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
This Review proceeds in three Parts. First, Part I examines Shielded’s text, highlighting Schwartz’s analysis of the problem of unaccountable police, the many barriers to holding police accountable, and her proposed solutions. Part II then critically examines Schwartz’s work, examining pieces of the problem she left undiscussed and the relative shortcomings of her discussion of possible solutions. Finally, Part III takes an abolitionist approach, delving into potential nonreformist reforms and the solution of full abolition, as well as examining the most significant objection to abolitionist approaches: the problem of violence.
Resistance Proceduralism: A Prologue To Theorizing Procedural Subordination, Portia Pedro
Resistance Proceduralism: A Prologue To Theorizing Procedural Subordination, Portia Pedro
Washington and Lee Law Review
Several legal scholars have discussed the role of slavery within their own family histories and a growing number of scholars are exploring the successes and strategies of lawyers and Black litigants in freedom suits and other litigation in the United States antebellum South. I build on these literatures with a focus on procedure. In this Article, I analyze procedures involved in a few of my ancestral and personal experiences. Some of the experiences with process involved litigation to be free from slavery while other experiences did not explicitly involve any law. But they all involved process.
Engaging in this practice—marshaling …
Defense Against The Dark Arts: The Diversity Rationale And The Failed Affirmative Defense Of Affirmative Action, Sheldon Bernard Lyke
Defense Against The Dark Arts: The Diversity Rationale And The Failed Affirmative Defense Of Affirmative Action, Sheldon Bernard Lyke
Washington and Lee Law Review
Over the past forty years, affirmative action advocates have participated in a defensive campaign where they have admitted that affirmative action is a form of justified discrimination. This Article finds this a dangerous strategy because it allows for the practice of misguided beliefs about race and remedies for racism. When schools fail to fight the pernicious perception that affirmative action is a racial preference, they allow the bulk of society to participate in the belief that there are no other remedial justifications for affirmative action—like remedying an institution’s history of discrimination, or curing a school’s present and ongoing discrimination by …
What Roosevelt Did To Brown V. Board Of Education, Or Race And Court Packing, Jill M. Fraley
What Roosevelt Did To Brown V. Board Of Education, Or Race And Court Packing, Jill M. Fraley
Scholarly Articles
Roughly one-third of American schools remain segregated. Scholars have offered a variety of explanations, mostly social and cultural, but sometimes legal, for why desegregation did not proceed effectively after Brown v. Board of Education. This Article articulates a less expected and previously undocumented cause: President Roosevelt's prior attempt at court packing slowed--even derailed--desegregation.
The story of what Roosevelt's court packing did to make the work of integration harder is a cautionary tale, particularly for those who want to alter the U.S. Supreme Court now in furtherance of a modern cause. The only reasonable route for reforming the Supreme Court must …
Prisons As Laboratories Of Antidemocracy, Brandon Hasbrouck
Prisons As Laboratories Of Antidemocracy, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
Prisons are woefully ineffective as tools to protect society from violence and exploitation, yet America’s prison population exploded in the twentieth century. On the outside, this devastated Black communities, Black opportunities, Black economic power, and Black voting power. Yet a similarly insidious development came from inside prison walls: prison administrators honed antidemocratic techniques for constraining and oppressing incarcerated persons, techniques that would later be deployed against the ostensibly free population. Jeffrey Bellin’s Mass Incarceration Nation provides a robust analysis of the ways state and federal policies have combined to create an explosion in the scope of American prisons in the …
The Impact Of Government Sponsored Segregation On Health Inequities: Addressing Death Gaps Through Reparations, Mariya Denisenko
The Impact Of Government Sponsored Segregation On Health Inequities: Addressing Death Gaps Through Reparations, Mariya Denisenko
Washington and Lee Law Review
Government sponsored segregation of urban neighborhoods has detrimentally impacted the health of Black Americans. Over the last century, federal, state, and local governments have promulgated racist laws and policies that shaped the racial divide of communities in major metropolitan cities. This divide has contributed to poor health outcomes and large discrepancies in life expectancy for Black Americans when compared to their White counterparts. While health is impacted by various factors, segregation has been shown to impose various challenges that make it difficult for Black Americans to attain good health.
Segregated Black communities struggle with economic inequality, environmental racism, and face …
Transforming The Future Of Work By Embracing Corporate Social Justice, Andrea Giampetro-Meyer
Transforming The Future Of Work By Embracing Corporate Social Justice, Andrea Giampetro-Meyer
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Professionals from Generations Y (millennials) and Z (Gen Z or zoomers) expect their employers to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). They want to work for companies that support individuals of various races, ethnicities, religions, abilities, genders, and sexual orientations. Professionals from these generations are seeking employers that have created a diverse workforce, clear promotion track, and a commitment to dismantling systemic racism. Companies that want to attract top talent are making DEI a priority. They are also implementing action plans to demonstrate their serious commitment to DEI because millennials and zoomers are quick to recognize and criticize performative approaches. …
Removing White Hoods From The Blue Line: A Legislative Solution To White Supremacy In Law Enforcement, Hope Elizabeth Barnes
Removing White Hoods From The Blue Line: A Legislative Solution To White Supremacy In Law Enforcement, Hope Elizabeth Barnes
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd took his final breaths. His death at the hands of multiple Minneapolis police officers was recorded by witnesses and viewed by millions. The public response to Floyd’s death was immediate and powerful. Americans were demanding change on a greater scale than ever before. The problem with policing is not Derek Chauvin, or the Minneapolis Police Department, but rather with the very institution. White supremacy is alive and well in American policing. This Note begins by examining the historic connection between white supremacist groups and law enforcement agencies. This Note then evaluates existing standards of …
Democratizing Abolition, Brandon Hasbrouck
Democratizing Abolition, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
When abolitionists discuss remedies for past and present injustices, they are frequently met with apparently pragmatic objections to the viability of such bold remedies in U.S. legislatures and courts held captive by reactionary forces. Previous movements have seen their lesser reforms dashed by the white supremacist capitalist order that retains its grip on power in America. While such objectors contend that abolitionists should not ask for so much justice, abolitionists should in fact demand significantly more.
Remedying our country’s history of subordination will not be complete without establishing abolition democracy. While our classical conception of a liberal republic asks us …
Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers
Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers
Scholarly Articles
It is my great good fortune to have been asked to comment on the remarkable Article Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights from Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals by Judge Jeremy D. Fogel, Professor Mary S. Hoopes, and Justice Goodwin Liu. Drawing on a rich vein of data gathered pursuant to a carefully crafted research design and extensive interviews, the authors provide the most detailed account to date regarding the selection criteria used by federal appeals court judges to select their law clerks. The authors pay special attention to the role that diversity plays in picking …
Allow Me To Transform: A Black Guy’S Guide To A New Constitution, Brandon Hasbrouck
Allow Me To Transform: A Black Guy’S Guide To A New Constitution, Brandon Hasbrouck
Scholarly Articles
Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution works within the tradition of lay synopses of constitutional law, filling a gap among those that came before. Some works have provided nonlawyers with an explicitly Black perspective on major issues in modern civil rights, while others have provided an introduction to constitutional law as a field. Mystal broadens the focus and audience, illuminating constitutional issues with his trademark humor and his life experience as a Black man in America. He creates a comprehensive overview for lay readers, emphasizing the experiences and needs of Black men. The …
Policing The College Campus: History, Race, And Law, Vanessa Miller, Katheryn Russell-Brown
Policing The College Campus: History, Race, And Law, Vanessa Miller, Katheryn Russell-Brown
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
The structure, impact, and historical roots of campus policing on the American college campus receives little academic attention. In fact, campus policing is often overlooked in legal analyses and research studies, including its relationship to race. Campus policing and race deserves a critical assessment from legal scholars because race is fixed to the ways the criminal-legal system presents itself on campus. The racialized implications of policing on campus are rooted in historical social and legal contexts that still exist today. However, the lack of research on campus policing is not surprising. American colleges and universities have successfully marketed themselves as …
High Anxiety: Racism, The Law, And Legal Education, Elayne E. Greenberg
High Anxiety: Racism, The Law, And Legal Education, Elayne E. Greenberg
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
Conspicuously absent from the United States’ ongoing discourse about its racist history is a more honest discussion about the individual and personal stressors that are evoked in people when they talk about racism. What if they got it wrong? The fear of being cancelled -- the public shaming for remarks that are deemed racist -- has had a chilling effect on having meaningful conversations about racism. What lost opportunities!
This paper moves this discussion into the law school context. How might law schools rethink their law school curricula to more accurately represent the role systemic racism has played in shaping …
Teaching Slavery In Commercial Law, Carliss N. Chatman
Teaching Slavery In Commercial Law, Carliss N. Chatman
Scholarly Articles
Public status shapes private ordering. Personhood status, conferred or acknowledged by the state, determines whether one is a party to or the object of a contract. For much of our nation’s history, the law deemed all persons of African descent to have a limited status, if given personhood at all. The property and partial personhood status of African-Americans, combined with standards developed to facilitate the growth of the international commodities market for products including cotton, contributed to the current beliefs of business investors and even how communities of color are still governed and supported. The impact of that shift in …
Taking The Knee No More: Police Accountability And The Structure Of Racism, David Dante Troutt
Taking The Knee No More: Police Accountability And The Structure Of Racism, David Dante Troutt
Washington and Lee Law Review
From before the birth of the republic to the present day, police brutality has represented a signature injustice of state authority, especially against African Americans. Defining that injustice is the lack of accountability for official misconduct. The rule of law has systematically failed to deter lawbreaking by its law enforcement departments. This Article explores the various legal and institutional means by which accountability should be imposed and demonstrates the design elements of structured immunity. Using Critical Race Theory and traditional civil rights law notions of how structural racism operates, this Article argues that transformative change can only come about through …
Sheriffs, Shills, Or Just Paying The Bills?: Rethinking The Merits Of Compelling Merchant Cooperation With Third-Party Policing In The Aftermath Of George Floyd’S Death, Stephen Wilks
Washington and Lee Law Review
This Article frames the killing of George Floyd as the result of flawed business regulation. More specifically, it captures the expansion of third-party policing paradigms throughout local nuisance abatement regulations over a period of time that coincided with the militarization of policing culture across the United States. Premised on the notion that law enforcement alone cannot succeed in reducing crime and disorder, such regulations transform grocery stores, pharmacies, bars, and other retail spaces into surveillance hubs by prescribing situations that obligate businesses to contact the police. This regulatory framework, however, sustains the larger historical project of rationalizing enhanced scrutiny of …
Higher Education Redress Statutes: A Critical Analysis Of States’ Reparations In Higher Education, Christopher L. Mathis
Higher Education Redress Statutes: A Critical Analysis Of States’ Reparations In Higher Education, Christopher L. Mathis
Washington and Lee Law Review
This Article introduces a novel concept, higher education redress statutes (“HERS”), to illustrate efforts that acknowledge and amend past wrongs towards African Americans. More proximally, the Article shines a probing light on the escalation of HERS in southeastern states that serve as a site for state regulation and monitoring. The Author exposes how higher education redress statutes, designed to provide relief or remedy to Black people for states’ higher education’s harm, categorically ignore groups of Black people who rightfully should also be members of the statutorily protected class. This Article queries whether legislators can expand the scope of such statutes …
The Black Fourth Amendment, Charisma Hunter
The Black Fourth Amendment, Charisma Hunter
Washington and Lee Law Review Online
Policing Black bodies serves at the forefront of the American policing system. Black bodies are subject to everlasting surveillance through institutions and everyday occurrences. From relaxing in a Starbucks to exercising, Black bodies are deemed criminals, surveilled, profiled, and subjected to perpetual implicit bias when participating in mundane activities. Black people should have the same protections as white people and should possess the ability to engage in everyday, commonplace, and routine activities.
The Fourth Amendment was not drafted with the intention of protecting Black bodies. In fact, Black bodies were considered three-fifths of a person at the drafting of the …
Check Your Bank Account First: Examining Copyright Formalities And Remedies Through A Race Conscious Lens, Emma Burri
Check Your Bank Account First: Examining Copyright Formalities And Remedies Through A Race Conscious Lens, Emma Burri
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
This Note examines copyright formalities through a race conscious lens and concludes that further change is necessary given the legacy of economic inequality that communities of color experience. It examines the history of copyright formalities in the United States and the disenfranchisement of Black musical creators through the theft of their intellectual property. In exploring the relationship between race, wealth, and musical copyright protection this Note explains why considering the economic inequality is relevant to ensure copyright protection for Black creators. This Note proposes abolishing the registration timeline for certain remedies and altering the filing fee structure of the copyright …
Revisiting The Ox-Bow Incident: The Almost Forgotten Western Classic About The Lynching Of Three Innocent Men Is As Relevant As Ever, Marc Bookman
Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
The concept of lynching, several hundred years old and unclear in its origins, has never really left the lexicon. The word itself, however, has taken on different meanings over the years, from a mob’s taking the law into its own hands, to an organized utilization of racial violence as a means of societal control and intimidation; and finally to the more casual and defensive use of the word (“high tech lynching”) by current Supreme Court justices Thomas and Kavanaugh and others after being questioned about their past behaviors. Many academics have opined that the modern system of capital punishment is …
Birthing Alone, Elizabeth Kukura
Birthing Alone, Elizabeth Kukura
Washington and Lee Law Review
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals implemented restrictive visitor policies that have prevented many pregnant people from giving birth with their chosen support people. For some, this meant foregoing labor and delivery support by a birth doula, someone who serves in a nonclinical role and provides emotional, physical, and informational support to birthing people. Given that continuous labor support such as the care provided by doulas is associated with fewer cesareans and other interventions, less need for pain medication, and shorter labors, the promotion of doula care is a promising strategy to ease the maternal health crisis and, in particular, shrink …
Sexual Violence, Intangible Harm, And The Promise Of Transformative Remedies, Jill C. Engle
Sexual Violence, Intangible Harm, And The Promise Of Transformative Remedies, Jill C. Engle
Washington and Lee Law Review
This Article describes alternative remedies that survivors of sexual violence can access inside and outside the legal system. It describes the leading restorative justice approaches and recommends one of the newest and most innovative of those—“transformative justice”—to heal the intangible harms of sexual violence. The Article also discusses the intersectional effects of sexual violence on women of color and their communities. It explains the importance of transformative justice’s intersectional approach to redress sexual violence. Transformative justice offers community-based, victim-centric methods that cultivate deep, lasting healing for sexual violence survivors and their communities, with genuine accountability for those who have caused …
(G)Local Intersectionality, Martha F. Davis
(G)Local Intersectionality, Martha F. Davis
Washington and Lee Law Review
Intersectionality theory has been slow to take root as a legal norm at the national level, even as scholars embrace it as a potent analytical tool. Yet, in recent years, intersectionality has entered law and policy practices through an unexpected portal: namely, local governments’ adoption of international norms. A growing number of local governments around the world explicitly incorporate intersectionality into their law and practice as part of implementing international antidiscrimination norms from human rights instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of …
Comment: Understanding Xenophobia As Intersectional Discrimination, Shreya Atrey
Comment: Understanding Xenophobia As Intersectional Discrimination, Shreya Atrey
Washington and Lee Law Review
This Comment examines the nature of xenophobia and why it seems to fall through the cracks of international human rights law, especially as a form of racial discrimination under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. It considers an understanding of xenophobia as a sui generis case of intersectional discrimination because it has to do with racial grounds but also perhaps other grounds (such as nationality, religion, language, culture, and class), which makes it difficult to disentangle the basis of xenophobic discrimination as based on strictly racial grounds alone.
Murdering Crows: Pauli Murray, Intersectionality, And Black Freedom, Lisa A. Crooms-Robinson
Murdering Crows: Pauli Murray, Intersectionality, And Black Freedom, Lisa A. Crooms-Robinson
Washington and Lee Law Review
What is intersectionality’s origin story and how did it make its way into human rights? Beginning in the 1940s, Pauli Murray (1910–1985) used Jane Crow to capture two distinct relationships between race and sex discrimination. One Jane used the race-sex analogy to show that race and sex were both unconstitutionally arbitrary. The other Jane captured Black women’s experiences and rights deprivations at the intersection of race and sex. Both Janes were based on Murray’s fundamental belief that the struggles against race and sex discrimination were different phases of the fight for human rights.
In 1966, Murray was part of the …
Foreword: Centering Intersectionality In Human Rights Discourse, Johanna Bond
Foreword: Centering Intersectionality In Human Rights Discourse, Johanna Bond
Washington and Lee Law Review
In the last decade, intersectionality theory has gained traction as a lens through which to analyze international human rights issues. Intersectionality theory is the notion that multiple systems of oppression intersect in peoples’ lives and are mutually constitutive, meaning that when, for example, race and gender intersect, the experience of discrimination goes beyond the formulaic addition of race discrimination and gender discrimination to produce a unique, intersectional experience of discrimination. The understanding that intersecting systems of oppression affect different groups differently is central to intersectionality theory. As such, the theory invites us to think about inter-group differences (i.e., differences between …
How To Get Away With Murder: When A White Male Police Officer Kills A Young Black Person, Mitchell F. Crusto
How To Get Away With Murder: When A White Male Police Officer Kills A Young Black Person, Mitchell F. Crusto
Washington and Lee Law Review Online
Systemic racism in policing allows police officers, in particular white men, to continue to perpetuate the violent killings of Black people. This violence is not accidental. Rather it is intentional and allowed to continue due to a failure by the Supreme Court to hold police officers accountable. This Article explains how the doctrines of qualified immunity, willful intent, and objective reasonableness, as condoned by the Court, allow police officers to “get away with murder.”