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Full-Text Articles in Law
Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander
Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander
Faculty Scholarship
Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond's masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee's urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted's readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between "law on the books" and "law-in-action." Its most …
Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell
Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell
Faculty Scholarship
Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales. Though some scholars and the media have highlighted how thousands of African-Americans have lost an untold amount of property and substantial real …
Tragedy & Remedy: Reparations For Disparities In Black Health, Kevin Outterson
Tragedy & Remedy: Reparations For Disparities In Black Health, Kevin Outterson
Faculty Scholarship
The Tragedy of American health care is the stubborn persistence of disparities in Black health, one hundred and forty years after Emancipation, and more than four decades after the passage of Title VI. Formal legal equality has not translated into actual health equality. This Tragedy is deeper and older than mere legal forms; it has been supported by powerful social institutions, including some governments, charities, market participants, religions, ideologies, and cultures. Black health disparities interact with other vestiges of slavery such as disparities in wealth, education, employment and housing. They have permeated the American health experience. Efforts to eliminate Black …
The Colored Man Standing By The Punch Bowl, Michael K. Jordan
The Colored Man Standing By The Punch Bowl, Michael K. Jordan
Faculty Scholarship
This essay will explore racial dissonance and how it affects our thinking about race relations and social policy in America. The first part of this essay will examine the concept of race. Though we often think of race as delineating real characteristics that exist objectively, race is actually a socially created abstraction. In addition, how this abstraction changes over time will also be explored. This is another way of saying that "colored people" has been replaced by the term "black people." The difference between the two terms raises important questions about social policy. Next, this article explores the connection among …
From Reconstruction To Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, And Community Through Partition Sales Of Tenancies In Common, Thomas W. Mitchell
From Reconstruction To Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, And Community Through Partition Sales Of Tenancies In Common, Thomas W. Mitchell
Faculty Scholarship
This article considers one of the primary ways in which African Americans have lost millions of acres of land that they were able to acquire in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning part of the twentieth century and the sociopolitical implications of this land loss. Specifically, this article highlights the fact that forced partition sales of tenancy in common property, referred to more commonly as heirs' property, have been a major source of black land loss within the African American community. The article argues that involuntary black land loss has had a significant negative impact upon …