Digital Commons Network^™

Corporate Racial Responsibility, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The 2020 mass protests in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor had a significant impact on American corporations. Several large public companies pledged an estimated $50 billion to advancing racial equity and committed to various initiatives to internally improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. While many applauded corporations’ willingness to engage with racial issues, some considered it further evidence of corporate capitulation to extreme progressivism at shareholders’ expense. Others, while thinking corporate engagement was long overdue, critiqued corporate commitment as insincere.

Drawing on historical evidence surrounding the passage of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of …

Of Protest And Property: An Essay In Pursuit Of Justice For Breonna Taylor, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In March 2020, Louisville police officers fatally shot Breanna Taylor in her apartment while executing a no-knock warrant. There was great outrage over the killing of the innocent woman, and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron led an investigation of the officer-involved shooting.

Activists protested in Louisville after Taylor's killing, and when Cameron's investigation appeared stalled, these activists even conducted a sit-in on Cameron's front lawn. They demanded immediate justice for Taylor. Cameron sharply responded, lecturing the activists on how to achieve justice. He contended that neither trespassing on private property nor escalation in tactics could advance the cause of justice. …

Martin, Ghana, And Global Legal Studies, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This brief essay uses global legal studies to reconsider Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s activism after Gayle v. Browder. During this undertheorized portion of King's career, the civil rights leader traveled the world and gained a greater appreciation for comparative legal and political analysis. This essay explores King's first trip abroad and demonstrates how King's close study of Kwame Nkrumah's approaches to law reform helped to lay the foundation for watershed moments in King's own life.

In To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., renowned civil rights scholar and author, Adam …

Crystal Eastman And The Internationalist Beginnings Of American Civil Liberties, John Fabian Witt

Duke Law Journal

The modern American civil liberties movement famously began with the United States's intervention in World War I. Yet these beginnings have long raised a conundrum for civil liberties historians. Why did the American civil liberties movement arise precisely when so many sophisticated legal and political thinkers began to call into question the truth value of abstract rights claims? The puzzling rise of civil liberties in an age of pragmatic skepticism is all the more startling given that early leaders of the civil liberties movement were themselves leading rights skeptics. This Article offers a new interpretation of the rise of the …

Citizen Soldiers: The North Carolina Volunteers And The War On Poverty, Robert R. Korstad, James L. Leloudis

Law and Contemporary Problems

During the summers of 1964 and 1965, more than 300 college students fanned out across the state of North Carolina in a bold campaign to defeat poverty and, as they saw it, to uplift the poor. Korstad and Leloudis trace the history of the North Carolina Fund's Volunteers program, provide an analysis of the contribution that those students made to fighting poverty in the state, and evaluate the impact of that experience on the lives of the Volunteers themselves.