Law Commons^™

The Aftermath Of September 11, 2001: The Targeting Of Arabs And Muslims In America, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

THE DEMONIZING OF ARABS AND Muslims in America began well before the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. It can be traced to deliberate mythmaking by film and media,² stereotyping as part of conscious strategy of 'experts' and polemicists on the Middle East,³ the selling of a foreign policy agenda by US government officials and groups seeking to affect that agenda,⁴ and a public susceptible to images identifying the unwelcome 'other* in its midst.⁵ Bearing the brunt of these factors are Arab and Muslim non-citizens in this country. A series of government laws and policies since …

The Unhappy History Of Civil Rights Legislation, Fifty Years Later, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

Seldom, if ever, have the power and the purposes of legislation been rendered so impotent.... All that is left today are afew scattered remnants of a once grandiose scheme to nationalize the fundamental rights of the individual.

These words were written fifty years ago by Eugene Gressman, now William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina School of Law, as a description of what the courts, primarily the Supreme Court of the United States, had done with the civil rights legislation passed by Congress in the wake of the Civil War. Professor Gressman's article, The Unhappy History of …

A Brief History Of Chicana/O School Segregation: One Rationale For Affirmative Action, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

This article uses Critical Race Theory methodologies, such as autobiographical narratives, and analytical approaches, such as revising the history of the civil rights struggle, especially as it applies to the Chicano-Latino communities. This paper represents a student-faculty collaboration in that the students organized the conference at which some of this analysis was first proposed. This was the conference at which now Justice Sonia Sotomayor made her now iconic comments about being a "wise Latina." People can't get to be judges without first going to law school, and Latinas/as can't get to law school, at least in significant numbers, without affirmative …

Teaching A Professional Responsibility Course: Lessons Learned From The Clinic, Antoinette M. Sedillo Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

In teaching Ethics or Professional Responsibility, I want to do more than teach students the law of the course. While it is important that students become familiar with and able to navigate the rules of professional responsibility, my clinical teaching has helped me develop additional educational objectives that I believe will affect their lives as future lawyers. I categorize my objectives in a three-credit classroom professional responsibility course as three-fold: 1) teaching the law of lawyering; 2) exploring professionalism issues;20 and 3) critically examining the profession. I will discuss a few of my experiences teaching in the clinic and how …

Gendered Shades Of Property: A Status Check On Gender, Race & Property, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the relationship between gender, race and property.Women in the United States continue to be economically disadvantaged, and women of color are even more disadvantaged. This article will open with a review of laws, past and present, which have shaped women's rights to own, manage and transfer property. It will then provide a status check of where women, including women of color, stand in the United States relative to the rest of the population vis-a-vis income and other indicators of economic well-being. The article will then discuss why economic inequality persists, trotting out the usual reasons of discrimination …

The Future Of Civil Rights: A Dialogue, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

Eight social science, humanities, and legal scholars discuss a wide range of perspectives on civil rights (edited by John Paul Ryan). The conversation traverses civil rights stories in the U.S. and abroad since 1968, the relationships between immigration and civil rights, the enforcement of civil rights and the role of the courts, and the impact of September 11 on civil rights in the future. Co-authored with John Paul Ryan, Angelo Ancheta, Erik Bleich, Tim Borstelmann, Gloria Browne-Marshall, Chai Feldblum, Anita Hodgkiss, & John D. Skrentny

Racial Profiling Under Attack, Samuel R. Gross, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

The events of September 11, 2001, have sparked a fierce debate over racial profiling. Many who readily condemned the practice a year ago have had second thoughts. In the wake of September 11, the Department of Justice initiated a program of interviewing thousands of men who arrived in this country in the past two years from countries with an al Qaeda presence – a program that some attack as racial profiling, and others defend as proper law enforcement. In this Essay, Professors Gross and Livingston use that program as the focus of a discussion of the meaning of racial profiling, …

Racial Justice: Moral Or Political?, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly one hundred years ago, W.E.B. DuBois predicted that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. Were he writing today, DuBois might well conclude that in the U.S., the problem of the coming century will be the problem of the color-bind. Although Americans arguably remain "the most 'race-conscious' people on earth," our national conversation about "race" now stands at an impasse. Our ways of talking, or refusing to talk, about race increasingly speak past the racialized dilemmas of educational equity, affirmative action, poverty, welfare reform, housing, lending, labor and employment discrimination, health …

Panel One: Gender, Race, And Sexuality: Historical Themes And Emerging Issues In Women's Rights Law: Introduction, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Hello and welcome. We are thrilled to see you all here. I speak on behalf of my co-panelists in thanking Sarah Weddington for laying some of the groundwork on which we are standing and for laying some of the foundation that gives rise to the issues we are going to talk about on this panel.

The First Decade: Critical Reflections, Or "A Foot In The Closing Door", Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In the introduction to Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, Gary Peller, Neil Gotanda, Kendall Thomas, and I framed the development of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a dialectical engagement with liberal race discourse and with Critical Legal Studies (CLS). We described this engagement as constituting a distinctively progressive intervention within liberal race theory and a race intervention within CLS. As neat as this sounds, it took almost a decade for these interventions to be fleshed out fully. Reflecting on the past ten years of CRT, this Article explores the course of these interventions from the …