Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Understanding An American Paradox: An Overview Of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Spearit

Articles

In The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom, Sahar Aziz unveils a mechanism that perpetuates the persecution of religion. While the book’s title suggests a problem that engulfs Muslims, it is not a new problem, but instead a recurring theme in American history. Aziz constructs a model that demonstrates how racialization of a religious group imposes racial characteristics on that group, imbuing it with racial stereotypes that effectively treat the group as a racial rather than religious group deserving of religious liberty.

In identifying a racialization process that effectively veils religious discrimination, Aziz’s book points to several important …

Hip Hop And The Law : Presented By Intellectual Property Law Association 03/31/2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Bright Anniversaries In Uncertain Times 10/06/2020, Nicole Dyszlewski, Louisa Fredey

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Racialized Tax Inequity: Wealth, Racism, And The U.S. System Of Taxation, Palma Joy Strand, Nicholas A. Mirkay

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article describes the connection between wealth inequality and the increasing structural racism in the U.S. tax system since the 1980s. A long-term sociological view (the why) reveals the historical racialization of wealth and a shift in the tax system overall beginning around 1980 to protect and exacerbate wealth inequality, which has been fueled by racial animus and anxiety. A critical tax view (the how) highlights a shift over the same time period at both federal and state levels from taxes on wealth, to taxes on income, and then to taxes on consumption—from greater to less progressivity. Both of these …

The Slaughterhouse Cases: “Unforeseen” Consequences And Public Reaction, Gavin Jensen

Departmental Honors Projects

This Project focuses on the Slaughterhouse Cases, the ramifications of the Supreme Court decision, and the reaction to the decision from the public. The Slaughterhouse Cases were a series of cases originating in New Orleans around the year 1869. The white, French butchers inside the city of New Orleans had been creating a sanitary and health issue for the city for decades. The lack of ways to dispose of offal and inedible product mixed with general apathy from the butchers as to how their practices were impacting the city led to widespread cholera epidemics.

To solve this issue the newly …

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …

What Happens In Vagueness Stays In Vagueness: The United States Constitution's Ideas On Race, Austin Clements

History Class Publications

The United States’ Constitution, while it may not explicitly discuss race in detail, has echoes of race throughout both its language and its history. Even during the origination of the Constitution, the inclusion of slavery was a hotly contested subject among the authors of the Constitution. The United States’ Constitution only uses the words “race” and “color” once and that is in the Fifteenth Amendment, which essentially gave black Americans the right to vote. While the US Constitution may not explicitly talk about race much, I argue that race is a present theme throughout the Constitution as well as behind …

Eugenics, Margaret Ann Donnell

History Class Publications

Naturally, and quite understandably, people avoid discussing the dark periods of human history, specifically the inconceivable acts of dehumanization imposed on their fellow man.

Individuals struggle to understand, sometimes simply because they cannot fathom, how a person—and in some cases, an institution—can manipulate and devalue another human being or groups of people. Often, the standards by which those with the “authority” to determine the lack of worth of the individual or population are arbitrary and subjective.

All of this is relevant in a conversation over the eugenics movement of the United States, occurring in the early to mid-twentieth century.

When …

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: "We the People." Robert Tsai's gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion--the defiant groups that refused to accept the Constitution's definition of who "the people" are and how their authority should be exercised. America's Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists, socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution. He examines …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Book Review: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

Many in the legal academy have heard of Michelle Alexander’s new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness. It has been making waves. One need only attend any number of legal conferences in the past year or so, or read through the footnotes in recent law review articles. Furthermore, this book has been reviewed in journals from a number of academic fields, suggesting Alexander has provided a text with profound insights across the university and public spheres. While I will briefly talk about the book as a book, I will spend the majority of this …

Associational Privacy And The First Amendment: Naacp V. Alabama, Privacy And Data Protection, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regionalism, The Supreme Court, And Effective Governance: Healing Problems That Know No Bounds, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

By actively endorsing remedies that favor a city-suburb divide, the Supreme Court has failed to allow regional development. The Supreme Court's federalism jurisprudence is unresponsive to the myriad issues pervading society. Ultimately, individuals must take action, through a process formulated in this article, to change the way in which governments and the courts respond to the needs of populations.

A battery of cases including Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny, Missouri v. Jenkins and Milliken v. Bradley, reached the Supreme Court during the tumultuous 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A vast array of environmental laws and housing regulations also …

Grutter V. Bollinger: This Generation's Brown V. Board Of Education, Michelle Adams

Faculty Articles

At first blush, Grutter appears to be a deviation from the body of the Court's recent affirmative action jurisprudence: it says "yes" where the other cases said "no." But it is not so clear that Grutter is a deviation from current law. Instead, it might be seen as consistent with it, in that the justification for the racial preference recognized in Grutter transcended the justifications offered in the previous cases, and the method used to achieve that end, "race as a factor," diffused rather than highlighted race. From this perspective, Grutter addressed several concerns that had troubled the Court for …

The Little Rock Crisis And Foreign Affairs: Race, Resistance, And The Image Of American Democracy, Mary L. Dudziak

Mary L. Dudziak

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce a school desegregation order at Central High School in the fall of 1957, more than racial equality was at issue. The image of American democracy was at stake. The Little Rock crisis played out on a world stage, as news media around the world covered the crisis. During the weeks of impasse leading up to Eisenhower's dramatic intervention, foreign critics questioned how the United States could argue that its democratic system of government was a model for others to follow when racial segregation was tolerated in …