Law Commons^™

The Meaning Of Mcdonald's [(R)], Laura A. Heymann

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

A Reckoning Over Law Faculty Inequality, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

Below, I review Dr. Meera E. Deo’s book, Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia, published last year by Stanford University Press. In Unequal Profession, Deo, an expert on institutional diversity, presents findings from a first-of-its-kind empirical study, documenting many of the challenges women of color law faculty confront daily in legal academia. Deo uses memorable quotes and powerful stories from the study’s faculty participants to present her important work in 169 readable and revealing pages. Unequal Profession begins by outlining the barriers women of color face when entering law teaching and progresses through the life cycle …

How Law Libraries Can Help Tell The Black Lives Matter Movement’S Story, Ronald E. Wheeler, Phebe Huderson-Poydras

Faculty Scholarship

In Voices Across the Spectrum, our goal is to explore issues, perspectives, and resources that focus on promoting diversity, equality, anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, multicultural outreach and recruitment into the profession, inclusive workplaces, and more. While the first installments of this new column will focus on systemic racism issues, each column will examine different diversity and inclusion issues to help prompt conversations and break down silos within the profession.

Caregivers’ Expectations, Reflected Appraisals, And Arrests Among Adolescents Who Experienced Parental Incarceration, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Melissa Noel

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

This research sought to identify a potential process by which intergenerational crime occurs, focusing on the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ subsequent arrests. We drew from Matsueda’s work on reflected appraisals as an explanatory mechanism for this effect. Thus, the present research examined whether caregivers’ and adolescents’ expectations for adolescents’ future incarceration sequentially mediated the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ actual arrest outcomes. Propensity score matching was used to examine this effect in a sample of 1,735 15- to 16-year-olds using NLSY97 data. Parental incarceration was positively related to caregivers’ expectations of adolescents’ future arrest. Moreover, caregivers’ expectations …

Law School News: Judge Rogeriee Thompson, Legal Pioneer Dorothy Crockett Among Influential "Women Of The Century" 08/19/2020, Eryn Dion, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Lessons On Race And Place-Based Participation From Environmental Justice And Geography, Sonya Ziaja

All Faculty Scholarship

As scholars grapple with racism in Administrative Law, it is important to consider place-based scholarship from the perspectives of Environmental Justice and Geography. Both provide important insights into how administrative agencies can be instruments of strategic-structural racism and how administrative law can facilitate equity in regulation.

Health Implications Of Incarceration And Reentry On Returning Citizens: A Qualitative Examination Of Black Men’S Experiences In A Northeastern City, Jason Williams, Sean K. Wilson, Carrie Bergeson

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

While a great deal of research captures the lived experiences of Black men as they navigate through the criminal legal system and onto reentry, very little research is grounded in how those processes are directly connected to their health. Although some research argues that mass incarceration is a determinant of poor health, there is a lack of qualitative analyses from the perspective of Black men. Black men face distinct pathways that lead them into the criminal legal system, and these same pathways await them upon reentry. This study aims to examine the health implications associated with incarceration and reentry of …

Taxation As A Site Of Memory: Exemptions, Universities, And The Legacy Of Slavery, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Many universities around the United States are attempting to grapple with their institution’s history of direct and indirect involvement with transatlantic slavery. One of the first schools to do so was Brown University, which appointed a special committee in 2003 to study its historic institutional ties to slavery. After three years of investigation and discussion, the Brown committee recommended the creation of a public campus memorial and widespread educational efforts. In 2015, Georgetown University undertook a similar investigation on its campus; the working group ultimately recommended renaming certain university buildings, erecting public memorials, creating an academic center of the study …

Discerning A Dignitary Offense: The Concept Of Equal 'Public Rights' During Reconstruction, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

The mountain of modern interpretation to which the language of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been subjected tends to overshadow the multiple concepts of antidiscrimination that were actually circulating at the time of its drafting. Moreover, as authors on race and law have pointed out, Congress itself lacked any African American representatives during the 1866–68 moment of transitional justice. The subsequent development of a “state action doctrine” limiting the reach of federal civil rights enforcement, in turn, eclipsed important contemporary understandings of the harms that Reconstruction-era initiatives sought to combat. In contrast to the oblique language …

Law School News: Remembering John Lewis 07-18-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Health Justice Is Racial Justice: A Legal Action Agenda For Health Disparities, Sheila Foster, Yael Cannon, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Acknowledging the urgency of both health and racial justice in this moment, Sheila Foster, Yael Cannon, and M. Gregg Bloche set forth a legal agenda to fight the health effects of racism in housing, policing, the environment, and other areas.

The Emerging Legal Architecture For Social Justice, Luz E. Herrera, Louise G. Trubek

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers advocating for social change are now front and center in newspapers and social media. This article discusses how a new breed of progressive lawyers envision social justice law practice today. These “critical lawyers” are diverse in background, gender, ethnicity and race. They see law as a complex, contradictory tool rather than a necessary and sufficient route to justice. Their practices differ from the traditional non-profit public interest firms of the earlier generation that assumed justice would result if law and lawyers were accessible. To highlight the differences, the article discusses the law practices of Beyond Legal Aid, Law for …

When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms And The Practice Of Criminal Law, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

We are in the midst of a fraught debate in criminal justice reform circles about the merits of using algorithms. Proponents claim that these algorithms offer an objective path towards substantially lowering high rates of incarceration and racial and socioeconomic disparities without endangering community safety. On the other hand, racial justice scholars argue that these algorithms threaten to entrench racial inequity within the system because they utilize risk factors that correlate with historic racial inequities, and in so doing, reproduce the same racial status quo, but under the guise of scientific objectivity.

This symposium keynote address discusses the challenge that …

Racial Stereotypes, Respectability Politics, And Running For President: Examining Andrew Yang's And Barack Obama's Presidential Bids, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of the pandemic, Andrew Yang’s response to anti-Asian American violence was criticized for placing responsibility on Asian Americans rather than those perpetrating the hate crimes. This article explores how "warring ideals for people of color can cause a lot of internal dissonance about what to say and how to act in certain situations.

See Original Blog Post on Internet.

The Eighth Amendment Power To Discriminate, Kathryn E. Miller

Faculty Articles

For the last half-century, Supreme Court doctrine has required that capital jurors consider facts and characteristics particular to individual defendants when determining their sentences. While liberal justices have long touted this individualized sentencing requirement as a safeguard against unfair death sentences, in practice the results have been disappointing. The expansive discretion that the requirement confers on overwhelmingly White juries has resulted in outcomes that are just as arbitrary and racially discriminatory as those that existed in the years before the temporary abolition of the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia.' After decades of attempting to eliminate the requirement, conservative justices …

Association Between Racial Discrimination And Health‐Related Quality Of Life And The Impact Of Social Relationships, Sze Yan Liu, Genevieve Bergeron, Nneka Lundy De La Cruz, L. Hannah Gould, Amber Levanon Seligson

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: Interpersonal racial discrimination is associated with poor health. Social relationships may moderate the impact of discrimination and represent modifiable behaviors that can be targeted by public health interventions. We described citywide associations between self-reported racial discrimination and health-related quality of life among the overall New York City (NYC) adult residential population and by four main race/ethnicity groups and explored whether social relationships moderated health effects of discrimination.

Methods: We analyzed cross-sectional survey data from 2335 adults weighted to be representative of the NYC population. We measured exposures to lifetime interpersonal racial discrimination in nine domains using a modifed version …

Creating And Undoing Legacies Of Resilience: Black Women As Martyrs In The Black Community Under Oppressive Social Control, Leah Iman Aniefuna, M. Amari Aniefuna, Jason M. Williams

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper contextualizes the struggles and contributions of Black motherhood and reproductive justice under police surveillance in Baltimore, Maryland. We conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers regarding their experiences and perceptions of policing in their community during the aftermath of the police-involved death of Freddie Gray. While the literature disproportionately focuses on Black males, little knowledge is known about the struggles and contributions of Black mothers in matters concerning police brutality and the fight against institutional violence. There still remains the question regarding the role of and impact on Black mothers during matters of institutional violence against Black children. We fill …

Aaron Burr Jr. And John Pierre Burr: A Founding Father And His Abolitionist Son, Sherri Burr

Faculty Scholarship

Aaron Burr Jr. (Class of 1772), the third Vice President of the United States, fathered two children by a woman of color from Calcutta, India. Their son, John Pierre Burr (1792-1864), would become an activist, abolitionist, and conductor on the Underground Railroad.

Reimagining Reentry: A Vision For Transformative Justice Beyond The Carceral State, Kemiya Nutter

Ethnic Studies Senior Capstone Papers

Throughout the past decade, mass incarceration has emerged as a buzzword within academic scholarship and public policy discourse that seeks to examine the unparalleled expansion of the contemporary carceral state. With 2.2 million Americans imprisoned and over 7 million under various forms of penal control, the United States maintains the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The unprecedented inflation in the nation’s incarceration rate is a direct manifestation of the 1970’s War on Drugs, which enabled the legislative transformations that permeate modern sentencing policy and procedure. Institutions of policing, surveillance, and incarceration are constitutive features of the carceral system’s …

Arbitrarily Selecting Black Arbitrators, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Calls for increased diversity among arbitrators have surged with the growth of the employer movement, so-called mandatory arbitration, which requires employees to agree to arbitrate employment discrimination matters as a condition of employment. Despite good-faith efforts by neutral service providers, civil rights organizations, bar associations, and employer and employee groups to identify and address the need for more diverse arbitrators in mandatory arbitration, many commentators still lament that this diversity problem reflects negatively on access to justice. With the #MeToo movement’s focus in recent years on the lack of a public and transparent resolution for sexual harassment matters, as well …

Public Matters? Comparing Decision-Making By Appointed And Elected Prosecutors In Cases Of Deadly Use-Of-Force By Police In The Hartford Judicial District And Suffolk County, Andrew E. Dubsky

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis dissects prosecutor discretion for appointed and elected prosecutors after a “catalyst” event shifts public opinion. Previous studies have shown that elected prosecutors are more likely to use discretion favoring the opinion of the public than their appointed counterparts (Bandyopadhyay 2014, Nelson 2014, and Valenti 2011). Because elected prosecutors are more likely to follow public opinion, they should also be more likely to respond to the demands of the public than their appointed counterparts. In effect, elected prosecutors are expected to be more likely to exercise discretion in their charging and prosecuting. To test this, I use the 2014 …

The Violence Of Nosy Questions, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay examines a little-studied aspect of police procedure: police officers’ unfettered power to ask questions of motorists. The questions officers ask after they have stopped a car can run the gamut from questions about the nature of the motorist’s travel plans to nosy personal questions. Such questions are often intrusive, and drivers report feeling degraded by having to answer them. This Essay argues that these questions should be regulated because giving officers complete control over what they ask motorists provides a significant space for racial discrimination in policing, creates resentment, and encourages minorities to distrust the police.

Compensation Regarding The Sioux Nation, Jacob Degallery

Student Writing

The Sioux Nation has been treated unfairly during the Lakota Wars and is still facing many of the same problems with reservation land rights. By looking at past and recent incidents, such as the injustice of removing of Sioux from the Black Hills and the Dakota Pipeline, the problem is explained, and potential solutions can be discussed. The Sioux should be fairly compensated for the loss of land and further land violations such as the issues regarding the Standing Rock Reservation stopped. The possibilities of Tribal Sovereignty and recognition within the Black Hills are specifically mentioned as potential solutions to …

Resentencing Of Juvenile Lifers: The Philadelphia Experience, Tarika Daftary-Kapur, Tina Zottoli

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We examined the Philadelphia District Attorney Office’s approach to juvenile lifer resentencing, which began in 2017 under the administration of District Attorney Seth Williams and has continued under the administration of District Attorney Larry Krasner. For cases resentenced as of December 31st, 2019, we describe similarities and differences between the Williams and Krasner administrations in decision making and sentence length reductions, and we report on the recidivism rate and estimated cost savings for Pennsylvania as a result of release.

From Public Health To Public Wealth: The Case For Economic Justice, Barbara L. Atwell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines how we can overlay the principle of serving the common good, which undergirds public health law, onto financial well-being. It suggests that we apply public health law principles to corporate law and culture. In matters of public health, we view quite broadly states' police power to protect the public good. Government is also empowered to protect the general welfare in matters of financial well-being. Using the “general welfare” as a guidepost, this Article challenges the conventional wisdom that corporations exist solely to maximize profit and shareholder value to the exclusion of virtually everything else. It proposes two …

Re-Reading Anita Bernstein's The Common Law Inside The Female Body From The Bottom Of The Well: Analysis Of The Central Park Five, Border Drownings, The Kavanaugh Confirmation, And The Coronavirus, Nadia B. Ahmad

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Immigration Challenges Of The Past Decade And Future Reforms, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, immigrants have faced numerous challenges in the United States, including a dramatic increase in deportations, the expansion and privatization of immigration detention, major changes to the asylum system combined with drastic cutbacks in refugee admissions, and a new wave of racism and xenophobia. This Article discusses these challenges and explores possible ways to address them in 2020 and beyond.

Gerrymandering Justiciability, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As illustrated by its 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court has gerrymandered its justiciability doctrines in a way that protects the political power of white voters. Comparing the Court’s willingness to find racial gerrymanders justiciable with its refusal to find partisan gerrymanders justiciable reveals a lack of doctrinal constraint. That gives the Court the discretionary power to uphold or strike down particular gerrymanders by deeming them racial or partisan in nature. Such discretion is problematic because, when the Supreme Court has exercised discretion in a racial context, it has historically done so to protect the …

Conclusion: A Way Forward, Peter B. Edelman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Where do we go next? I have three suggestions. One is to enlarge the frame of our work on poverty and race, including a focus on the ever-widening chasm of inequality, and all of it pressing toward the center stage of national attention. A second is to consolidate our work about income, jobs, and cash assistance into a unified frame, which I call a three-legged stool. And the third is to think from a perspective of place, and what that tells us about our antipoverty work.

We need a banner, a message, a theme, a politics for ending poverty. The …

Law School News: Stonger Together: A Black Law Student Association Photoshoot 03-02-2020, Julia Rubin, Xaviea Brown, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.