Law Commons^™

Gen Y More Black Corporate Directors, Chaz Brooks

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Corporate diversity has been in the spotlight for decades. Recent efforts have followed years of legal scholarship, arguments on the business rationale for greater diversity, and more recently, the racial unrest during the summer of 2020. Called by some, a “racial reckoning,” the summer of 2020 catalyzed many corporate declarations on the importance of diversity, and more to the point of this article, the necessity of righting the economic disadvantages of Black Americans. This article looks specifically at one intervention by a corporate player following summer 2020, Nasdaq’s volley to increase corporate diversity through required disclosure. This article reviews the …

Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series: Breaking Bias: A Conversation With Attorney Anu Gupta 9-10-2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Indiana Law Supporting Newly Established Indiana Innocence Project, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

Law students from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law will have the opportunity to help exonerate wrongfully convicted Hoosiers through the newly established Indiana Innocence Project, which officially launched Saturday (Aug. 17).

Established in association with the national Innocence Project—which has helped free more than 240 wrongfully convicted prisoners since 1992—the Indiana Innocence Project (INIP) has been made possible through the support of the Herbert Simon Family Foundation, along with the Law School and IU’s Department of Criminal Justice.

The Indiana Innocence Project will screen and investigate cases with meritorious innocence claims, secure DNA testing when biological evidence …

We Are The Ai Problem, Tonja Jacobi, Matthew Sag

Emory Law Journal Online

This Essay describes what we call “the Black Nazi Problem,” a shorthand for the sometimes-jarring text and images produced by AI, from the incongruous—such as female Indian popes—to the outrageous—such as depicting minorities as their own historical oppressors, including Black Nazis. These images were the result of overzealous efforts by AI developers to correct for a lack of diverse representation in the training data used to create Generative AI models. The overrepresentation of white, fully-abled, Western men in images of high status categories, and the invisibility of women, people of color, and the disabled, except in low status categories, and …

Rwu School Of Law Social Justice Camp, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Mandell-Boisclair Justice Camp Prepares Young Scholars To Become Future Lawyers, Social Justice Advocates 7-26-2024, Jordan J. Phelan, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

20th Annual Diversity Symposium Dinner 3-26-2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Lecture 1-26-24, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Thusi Selected As John Hope Franklin Prize Recipient, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

The Law and Society Association will honor an Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor this week at its 2024 Annual Meeting in Denver from June 6-9.

Professor India Thusi will receive the John Hope Franklin Prize, recognizing exceptional scholarship in the field of Race, Racism and the Law.

Thusi’s winning work, “The Racialized History of Vice Policing,” was published in the UCLA Law Review in 2023.

“The article provides an enduring scholarly contribution at the intersection of policing, abolition, and legal history,” according to the LSA. “Thusi adopts an abolitionist framework and provides a much-needed analysis of vice policing …

Critical Race Theory Bans And The Changing Canon: Cultural Appropriation In Narrative, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

Thirty-five states have enacted critical race theory bans at the level of elementary and secondary public education, and seven states have extended these to the university level. One way to resist these attempts to repress a healthy democracy by whitewashing history is through a pedagogy of antiracism, including literary works. The question of what that would look like involves questions of cultural appropriation, which occurs when one takes from another culture, such as a writer creating a narrative about a character outside of the writer’s cultural identity. This Article considers the story of Ota Benga, brought from the Congo to …

Redistributing Justice, Benjamin Levin, Kate Levine

Faculty Articles

This Essay surfaces an obstacle to decarceration hiding in plain sight: progressives’ continued support for the carceral system. Despite progressives’ increasingly prevalent critiques of criminal law, there is hardly a consensus on the left in opposition to the carceral state. Many left-leaning academics and activists who may critique the criminal system writ large remain enthusiastic about criminal law in certain areas— often areas in which defendants are imagined as powerful and victims as particularly vulnerable.

In this Essay, we offer a novel theory for what animates the seemingly conflicted attitude among progressives toward criminal punishment—the hope that the criminal system …

Should Racially Vulnerable Victims Show Mercy?, Ekow N. Yankah

Articles

On June 17, 2015, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, sat, and prayed with nine congregants for at least an hour before pulling out a handgun and killing Cynthia Hurd, Susan Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, State Senator Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Singleton, and Myra Thompson.' He left three survivors, explicitly so they could "tell the story" of his killings. Roof did so for his own demented reasons; his racist rage was laid out publicly in an online manifesto, and he hoped his murders would begin a …

The Perennial Eclipse: Race, Immigration, And How Latinx Count In American Politics, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Evenwel v. Abbott, a case challenging the use of total population in state legislative apportionment as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The plaintiffs sued Texas, alleging that the State impermissibly diluted their voting power because they lived in areas with a high proportion of voting-age citizens. When total population was used to draw district lines, the plaintiffs had to compete with more voters to get their desired electoral outcomes than was true for voters in districts with low proportions of voting-age citizens. The Court rejected the argument, finding that states enjoy …

Rwu Law Alumni Newsletter April 2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

Amdip Annual Meeting Of Law School Diversity Professionals: Hosted By Roger Williams University School Of Law: April 23-25, 2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

"I Am Become Death, The Destroyer Of Worlds": Applying Strict Liability To Artificial Intelligence As An Abnormally Dangerous Activity, Renee Henson

Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools have produced a myriad of injuries, up to and including death. This burgeoning technology has caused scholars to ask questions, such as, How do we create a legal framework for AI? Because AI creators have acknowledged that even they do not know the capacities of their technology for good or bad outcomes, this Article argues that an existing framework, strict liability, is an appropriate fit for harms arising from this new technology because a party need not prove negligence to prevail. Strict liability was uniquely developed to handle those activities that are “abnormally dangerous.” An abnormally …

A Performative Model For Conducting Critical Race Analysis: Josephine Baker, Modern Dance, And Utilizing Narrative To Transform Legal Doctrine, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Legislating Morality In The Gilded Age And Progressive Era: Moral Panic And The “White Slave” Case That Changed America, Nancy C. Unger

History

This article is based on the presidential address presented to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in 2023. Its focus is Maury Diggs and Drew Caminetti, two white men from Sacramento, California, charged with violating the Mann Act (known as the White Slave Trafficking Act) in 1913. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era obsession with white slavery, a phenomenon that has particular resonance in today’s climate, reveals the power of moral panics. Examining the steps, and missteps, that various legal, social, and political …

Law School News: Rwu School Of Law Launches Institute For Race And The Law And Celebrates Champions For Justice 3-22-2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Champions For Justice 2024, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Expanding The Ban On Forced Arbitration To Race Claims, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

When Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (“EFASASHA”) in March 2022, it signaled a major retreat from the Supreme Court’s broad enforcement of agreements to force employees and consumers to arbitrate discrimination claims. But the failure to cover protected discriminatory classes other than sex, especially race, tempers any exuberance attributable to the passage of EFASASHA. This Article prescribes an approach for employees and consumers to rely upon EFASASHA as a tool to prevent both race and sex discrimination claims from being forced into arbitration by employers and companies. This approach relies upon procedural …

Prior Racist Acts And The Character Evidence Ban In Hate Crime Prosecutions, Paul F. Rothstein, Ronald J. Coleman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The killing of unarmed African-American Ahmaud Arbery and others ignited a wave of public outrage and re-focused attention on race and the criminal justice system. During the recent federal hate crimes proceedings for Arbery’s death, the prosecution introduced evidence relating to the alleged past racist acts of the defendants. This type of evidence may be seen as highly probative and desperately needed to do justice in hate crimes cases. On its face, however, such type of evidence appears to be inadmissible owing to the well-known—but little understood— evidentiary ban on character evidence prescribed in Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) and …

Deny, Defund, And Divert: The Law And American Miseducation, Janel A. George

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Racial inequality in public education is not inevitable, it is constructed. The law has been elemental in crafting racial inequality in public education. In this Article, I posit that lawmakers seeking to entrench racial inequality in and through public education do so by enacting laws designed to deny Black children access to education, defund public schools disproportionately attended by Black children, and divert many Black educators away from the public education system. This Article draws a through-line between laws enacted to prevent desegregation in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling—an era known as massive resistance—and recently …

Maurer Blsa Earns Midwest Chapter Of The Year, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

The Black Law Students Association at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law has earned national recognition, taking home Medium Chapter of the Year honors at the 56th Midwest BLSA Regional Convention in early February.

The Midwest BLSA community includes dozens of chapters at law schools from Colorado to Ohio, including nearly all of the schools in the Big Ten conference.

“Our Black Law Students Association isn’t just one of the best in the Midwest, it’s one of the best in the country,” said Indiana Law Dean Christiana Ochoa. “Congratulations to Nashuba Hudson, the executive board, and all who have …

Law School News: From The Community, For The Community 1/21/24, Suzi Morales, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Unshielded: How The Police Can Become Touchable, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

This Review proceeds in three Parts. First, Part I examines Shielded’s text, highlighting Schwartz’s analysis of the problem of unaccountable police, the many barriers to holding police accountable, and her proposed solutions. Part II then critically examines Schwartz’s work, examining pieces of the problem she left undiscussed and the relative shortcomings of her discussion of possible solutions. Finally, Part III takes an abolitionist approach, delving into potential nonreformist reforms and the solution of full abolition, as well as examining the most significant objection to abolitionist approaches: the problem of violence.

Racial Targets, Atinuke O. Adediran

Faculty Scholarship

It is common scholarly and popular wisdom that racial quotas are illegal. However, the reality is that since 2020’s racial reckoning, many of the largest companies have been touting specific, albeit voluntary, goals to hire or promote people of color, which this Article refers to as “racial targets.” The Article addresses this phenomenon and shows that companies can defend racial targets as distinct from racial quotas, which involve a rigid number or proportion of opportunities reserved exclusively for minority groups. The political implications of the legal defensibility of racial targets are significant in this moment in American history, where race …

Can Crt Save Dei?: Workplace Diversity, Equity & Inclusion In The Shadow Of Anti-Affirmative Action, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

Just four years after the nation’s summer of 2020 protests—sparked by the murder of George Floyd— culminated in a racial reckoning in which many organizations across the country instituted racial equity measures and policies, legislators across the nation are enacting anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bans in a seeming backlash to this advocacy for racial justice. The bans simultaneously mischaracterize CRT as anti-White discrimination while strategically conflating it with workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Further inflaming the racially hostile public discourse is the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), which greatly narrows …

Toward A Better Criminal Legal System: Improving Prisons, Prosecution, And Criminal Defense, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

Articles

During the Fall 2023 semester, 15 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 13 incarcerated (Inside) students from the State Correctional Institution – Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full semester class together called Issues in Criminal Justice and Law. The class, occurring each week at the prison, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange pedagogy, and was facilitated by Professor David Harris. Subjects include the purposes of prison, addressing crime, the criminal legal system and race, and issues surrounding victims and survivors of crime. The course culminated in a Group Project; under the heading “improving the …

The Celebration Of Interracial Intimacy Racial Mixture As The Cure For Racism – A Critical View, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.