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Selected Works

Civil Rights

Susan D. Carle

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

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Conceptions Of Agency In Social Movement Scholarship: Mack On African American Civil Rights Lawyers [Comments], Susan D. Carle Dec 2013

Conceptions Of Agency In Social Movement Scholarship: Mack On African American Civil Rights Lawyers [Comments], Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)-namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites …

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How Myth-Busting About The Historical Goals Of Civil Rights Activism Can Illuminate Paths For The Future, Susan D. Carle Sep 2011

How Myth-Busting About The Historical Goals Of Civil Rights Activism Can Illuminate Paths For The Future, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

  • This article considers four myths about the history of civil rights activism, taht have tended to cloud assessments about current current civil rights law and its potential future directions. I argue that correcting those myths can help illunundile promising paths for the future. In each instance, alternative historical narrative routes for further development of core principles of civil rights law, including further theoretical and practical work to pursue long-standing concepts of structural discrimination, the promise of experimentalist approaches to regulation and enforcement, increased interdisciplinary colaboration between law and other social science fields, and more focus on matters of economic inequality …

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Debunking The Myth Of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions Of Racial Justice In The Thought Of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890, Susan D. Carle Mar 2010

Debunking The Myth Of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions Of Racial Justice In The Thought Of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

n recent years, the supposed achievements of the American civil rights movement have come under attack as part of a critique of the ideology of legal liberalism. That critique argues that civil rights lawyers and other activists too greatly emphasized court-focused strategies aimed at achieving what would turn out to be pyrrhic "civil" rights victories - i.e., gains solely in "formal" equality in requirements enshrined in law as to how the state should treat its citizens. This critique of legal liberalism is well deserved insofar as it is aimed at a tendency within legal academia to extol the virtues of …

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A Social Movement History Of Title Vii Disparate Impact Analysis, Susan D. Carle Mar 2010

A Social Movement History Of Title Vii Disparate Impact Analysis, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

This Article examines the social movement history of Title VII disparate impact law in light of the policy and potential constitutional questions the Court=s recent decision in Ricci v. DeStefano raises. My analysis shows that, contrary to popular assumptions, disparate impact doctrine was not a last-minute, ill-conceived invention of the EEOC following Title VII=s passage, but instead arose out of a moderate, experimentalist regulatory tradition that sought to use law to create incentives to motivate employers to scrutinize and reform employment practices that posed structural bars to employment opportunities for racial minorities, regardless of invidious intent. Non-lawyer activists within the …

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Debunking The Myth Of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions Of Racial Justice In The Thought Of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890 Symposium: The Lawyer's Role In A Contemporary Democracy: Promoting Social Change And Political Values, Susan D. Carle Dec 2008

Debunking The Myth Of Civil Rights Liberalism: Visions Of Racial Justice In The Thought Of T. Thomas Fortune, 1880-1890 Symposium: The Lawyer's Role In A Contemporary Democracy: Promoting Social Change And Political Values, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

This essay addresses the development of American understandings of the various roles of lawyers in building democracy by focusing on legal reform efforts in the American civil rights movement. In recent years, the supposed achievements of that movement have come under attack as part of a critique of the ideology of legal liberalism. That critique argues that civil rights lawyers and other activists too greatly emphasized court-focused strategies aimed at achieving what would turn out to be Pyrrhic "civil" rights victories-i.e., gains solely in "formal" equality through requirements enshrined in law as to how the state must treat its citizens.

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Elite Privilege And Public Interest Lawyering [Comments], Susan D. Carle Dec 2001

Elite Privilege And Public Interest Lawyering [Comments], Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

In 1916, Charles Anderson Boston, one of the members of the first national Legal Redress Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke at the organization's board of directors meeting to endorse the use of new litigation strategies in the fight against racial segregation. The “proper presentation of the legal fight against segregation,” Boston urged, should focus on gathering “facts, not law” to demonstrate to the courts the law's “actual operation.”; Boston's emphasis on using facts to demonstrate the law's operation accorded with the NAACP's litigation strategy, which relied not only on gathering and presenting such …

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