Law Commons^™

The Torture Machine (Book Review), Dennis Cunningham, Jeffrey J. Haas

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Rwu Law News: The E-Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law January 2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Etched In Stone: Historic Preservation Law And Confederate Monuments, Jess R. Phelps, Jessica Owley

Articles

This Article examines the current controversy regarding Confederate monuments. While many have focused on the removal of these commemorative objects, the legal framework regarding their protection has not been fully explored. This Article provides an in-depth understanding of the application of historic preservation laws to monument removal efforts and examines the impact of these federal, state, and local laws. The examination raises significant questions about the permanency of preservation laws generally. This Article considers how historic significance is evaluated and valued, noting the lack of flexibility and absence of mechanisms for reevaluating past protection decisions. This Article uses the Confederate …

Dignity Transacted, Lu-In Wang, Zachary W. Brewster

Articles

In interactive customer service encounters, the dignity of the parties becomes the currency of a commercial transaction. Service firms that profit from customer satisfaction place great emphasis on emotional labor, the work that service providers do to make customers feel cared for and esteemed. But performing emotional labor can deny dignity to workers, by highlighting their subservience and requiring them to suppress their own emotions in an effort to elevate the status and experiences of their customers. Paradoxically, the burden of performing emotional labor may also impose transactional costs on some customers by facilitating discrimination in service delivery. Drawing on …

Foreword To Latcrit 2017 Symposium: What's Next? Resistance Resilience And Community In The Trump Era, Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Jorge R. Roig, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Articles

In this Foreword, we strive to contextualize “LatCrit XXI: What’s Next?” against the backdrop of two crises: the current political crisis in the United States and the continuing crisis of scarcity that impacts the legal academy. Through an examination of these crises, we will reveal how LatCrit scholars, in their efforts to build community and in their commitment to critical outsider scholarship, are part of the constellations of resistance that struggle against el mundo malo. We will argue that LatCrit has become a necessary institution for those seeking to engage in persistent resistance and dissent in the critical and progressive …

Uncovering Juror Racial Bias, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The presence of bias in the courtroom has the potential to undermine public faith in the adversarial process, distort trial outcomes, and obfuscate the search for justice. In Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court held for the first time that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments required post-verdict judicial inquiry in criminal cases where racial bias clearly served as a “significant motivating factor” in juror decision-making. Courts will nonetheless likely struggle in interpreting what constitutes a "clear statement of racial bias" and whether such bias constituted a "significant motivating factor" in a juror's verdict. This Article will examine how …

Out Of Bounds: A Critical Race Theory Perspective On "Pay For Play", Kevin D. Brown, Antonio Williams

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Under the amateur/education model, the amount of funding that colleges and universities can provide to their student-athletes is limited to the athletes' cost of attending their institution. This model makes sense for most college sports, but National Collegiate Athletic Association ("NCAA") Division I Football Bowl Subdivision and Division I men's basketball tend to generate almost all the revenue to fund their institution's entire athletic programs-as well as a substantial percentage of the revenues received by the NCAA. Furthermore is the realization that a majority of the elite athletes in these two revenue-generating sports are black. As revenues generated by these …

Race Ipsa Loquitur, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The goal of this Article is to make the existence of invidious racial discrimination in the United States so palpable that it can no longer be denied. Part I argues that racial inequality is so pervasive, unconscious, and structural that it has simply become an assumed fixture of United States and is rarely even noticed. Section I.A describes the history of racial subordination in the United States. Section I.B invokes the concept of disparate impact to illustrate the continuing manifestations of invidious discrimination in contemporary culture. Part II describes the manner in which the culture nevertheless chooses to deny the …

The Brandeis Thought Experiment: Reflection On The Elimination Of Racial Bias In The Legal System, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

This essay prompts the reader to engage in a thought experiment and consider their own limits in advancing the cause of; a legal system free from racism and bias, and lawyers are encouraged to use the experience of a young Louis Brandeis as a guide in this self-reflection. Specifically, this essay calls attention to the fact that Louis Brandeis started his legal career, at the same time when, and in the same place where thousands of African Americans were escaping persecution and traveling in search of economic and political freedom, yet he was publicly absent on issues of race. As …

Mens Rea Reform And Its Discontents, Benjamin Levin

Publications

This Article examines the debates over recent proposals for “mens rea reform.” The substantive criminal law has expanded dramatically, and legislators have criminalized a great deal of common conduct. Often, new criminal laws do not require that defendants know they are acting unlawfully. Mens rea reform proposals seek to address the problems of overcriminalization and unintentional offending by increasing the burden on prosecutors to prove a defendant’s culpable mental state. These proposals have been a staple of conservative-backed bills on criminal justice reform. Many on the left remain skeptical of mens rea reform and view it as a deregulatory vehicle …

Talking About Black Lives Matter And #Metoo, Linda S. Greene, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Bridget J. Crawford, Mehrsa Baradaran, Noa Ben-Asher, I. Bennett Capers, Osamudia R. James, Keisha Lindsay

Publications

This essay explores the apparent differences and similarities between the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. In April 2019, the Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society hosted a symposium entitled “Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Black Lives Matter and the Role of Intersectional Legal Analysis in the Twenty-First Century.” That program facilitated examination of the historical antecedents, cultural contexts, methods, and goals of these linked equality movements. Conversations continued among the symposium participants long after the end of the official program. In this essay, the symposium’s speakers memorialize their robust conversations and also dive more deeply into the phenomena, …

Why The Legal Strategy Of Exploiting Immigrant Families Should Worry Us All, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article applies a family law lens to explore the systemic and traumatic effects of modern laws and policies on immigrant families. A family law lens widens the scope of individuals harmed by recent immigration laws and policies to show why all families are affected and harmed by shifts in state power, state action, and state rhetoric. The family law lens reveals a worrisome shift in intentionality that has moved the state from a bystander to family-based immigration trauma to an incendiary agent perpetrating family trauma.

Modern immigration laws and policies are deploying legal and political strategies that intentionally sever …

Environmental Justice And The Possibilities For Environmental Law, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Climate change and extreme inequality combine to cause disproportionate harms to poor communities throughout the world. Further, unequal resource allocation is shot through with the structures of racism and other forms of discrimination. This Essay explores these phenomena in two different places in the United States, and traces law’s role in constructing environmental and economic vulnerability. The Essay then proposes that solutions, if there are any to be had, lie in expanding our notions of what kinds of laws are relevant to achieving environmental justice, and in seeing law as a possible tactic for instigating broader social change but not …

Human Rights Racism, Anna Spain Bradley

Publications

International human rights law seeks to eliminate racial discrimination in the world through treaties that bind and norms that transform. Yet law’s impact on eradicating racism has not matched its intent. Racism, in all of its forms, remains a massive cause of discrimination, indignity, and lack of equality for millions of people in the world today. This Article investigates why. Applying a critical race theory analysis of the legal history and doctrinal development of race and racism in international law, Professor Spain Bradley identifies law’s historical preference for framing legal protections around the concept of racial discrimination. She further exposes …

Drugs' Other Side Effects, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

Drugs often induce unintended, adverse physiological reactions in those that take them—what we commonly refer to as “side-effects.” However, drugs can produce other, broader, unintended, even non-physiological harms. For example, some argue that taking Truvada, a drug that prevents HIV transmission, increases promiscuity and decreases condom use. Expensive Hepatitis C treatments threaten to bankrupt state Medicaid programs. BiDil, which purported to treat heart conditions for self-identified African-Americans, has been criticized for reifying racial categories. Although the Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”) has broad discretion under the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act (“FDCA”) to regulate drugs, it generally considers only traditional …

Dismantling Structural Inequality: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Race-Based Policing - A Symposium Summary, Cedric Merlin Powell, Laura R. Mcneal

Faculty Scholarship

The prominence of the carceral state in American society serves to undermine basic principles of democracy and justice, disproportionately displacing people of color and excluding them from all viable avenues of citizenship.

Johnny Appleseed: Citizenship Transmission Laws And A White Heteropatriarchal Property Right In Philandering, Sexual Exploitation, And Rape (The Whp) Or Johnny And The Whp, Blanche Cook

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Title 8, United States Code, Section 1409-one of this country's

citizenship transmission laws-creates a white heteropatriarchal property right

in philandering, sexual exploitation, and rape (the "WHP"). Section 1409

governs the transmission of citizenship from United States citizens to their

children, where the child is born abroad, outside of marriage, and one parent is a

citizen and the other is not. Section 1409, however, draws a distinct gender

distinction between women and men: An unwed female American citizen who

births a child outside the United States, fathered by a foreign man, automatically

transmits citizenship to her child. An unwed male American …

The Structural Dimensions Of Race: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Binary Disruptions, Cedric Merlin Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Disrupting traditional conceptions of structural inequality, state decision making power, and the presumption of Black criminality, this Essay explores the doctrinal and policy implications of James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own, and Paul Butler’s evocative and transformative book, Chokehold. While both books grapple with how to dismantle the structural components of mass incarceration, state legitimized police violence against Black bodies, and how policy functions to reify oppressive state power, the approaches espoused by Forman and Butler are analytically distinct. Forman locates his analysis in the dynamics of decision-making power when African American officials wield power …

Using Shifts In Deployment And Operations To Test For Racial Bias In Police Stops, John M. Macdonald, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we exploit a policy experiment in the New York Police Department (NYPD) to test for bias in police stops. The NYPD launched Operation Impact in 2003 to change the scale of officer deployments. High crime areas were designated as “impact zones” and saturated with recent police academy graduates. These officers were encouraged to stop, question, and frisk (SQF) crime suspects as part of the NYPD’s overall crime-reduction strategy (MacDonald, Fagan, and Geller 2016). We focus on the expansion of impact zones in Brooklyn and Queens in July 2007. We use geographic data on the boundaries of the …

Talking About Black Lives Matter And #Metoo, Linda S. Greene, Lolita Buckner Inniss, Bridget J. Crawford, Mehrsa Baradaran, Noa Ben-Asher, I. Bennett Capers, Osamudia James, Keisha Lindsay

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This essay explores the apparent differences and similarities between the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. In April 2019, the Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society hosted a symposium entitled “Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Black Lives Matter and the Role of Intersectional Legal Analysis in the Twenty-First Century.” That program facilitated examination of the historical antecedents, cultural contexts, methods, and goals of these linked equality movements. Conversations continued among the symposium participants long after the end of the official program. In this essay, the symposium’s speakers memorialize their robust conversations and also dive more deeply into the phenomena, …

Revitalizing The Meaning Of Diversity For Racial Justice In Education, Tanya K. Hernandez

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of diversity undermines the true spirit of any affirmative action policy, which is to remedy society's racism and promote racial justice and equality. This is because “diversity” detached from racial justice can signify any human difference unrelated to social inequality. Infusing the notion of “diversity” with the insights from implicit bias research would mean instead considering the goal of “diversity” as a device for making admissions procedures more equitable and justified amidst the continuing implicit bias that can be actually measured. Furthermore, connecting the diversity goal as a device for procedurally addressing

implicit bias in admissions decisions and …

Federally Funded Slaving, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article presents a new frame of reference for thinking about the federal government’s complicity in supporting the domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States. While scholars have accounted for several methods of such support, they have failed to consider how federal bankruptcy legislation during the 1840s functionally created a system of direct financial grants to slave traders in the form of debt discharges. Relying on a variety of primary sources, including manuscript court records that have not been systematically analyzed by any published scholarship, this Article shows how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 enabled severely indebted slave traders …

Defending White Space, Addie C. Rolnick

Scholarly Works

Police violence against minorities has generated a great deal of scholarly and public attention. Proposed solutions—ranging from body cameras to greater federal oversight to anti-bias training for police—likewise focus on violence as a problem of policing. Amid this national conversation, however, insufficient attention has been paid to private violence. This Article examines the relationship between race, self-defense laws, and modern residential segregation. The goal is to sketch the contours of an important but undertheorized relationship between residential segregation, private violence, and state criminal law. By describing the interplay between residential segregation and modern self-defense law, this Article reveals how criminal …

A Wall Of Hate: Eminent Domain And Interest-Convergence, Philip Lee

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Donald Trump is no stranger to eminent domain. In the 1990s, Trump wanted land around Trump Plaza to build a limousine parking lot. Many of the private owners agreed to sell, but one elderly widow and two brothers who owned a small business refused. Trump then got a government agency—the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA)—to take the properties through eminent domain, offering them a quarter of what they had previously paid or been offered for their land.

The property owners fought back and finally won. Although the CRDA named several justifications, from economic development to traffic alleviation and additional …

Whiteness As Innocence, David Simson

Articles & Chapters

Current antidiscrimination law is exceedingly hostile to the project of race-conscious remediation—the conscious use of race to mitigate America’s persistent racial hierarchy. This Article argues that this broad hostility can be traced in significant part to what I call “Whiteness as Innocence” ideology. This ideology is a system of legal reasoning by which the formal principle of equality is filled with the substantive principle of white racial dominance via invocations of white innocence. That is, under this ideology, ideas about white innocence influence legal decisions on who is “alike” and “unalike” and what constitutes “alike” and “unalike” treatment in race-conscious …

Death By Stereotype: Race, Ethnicity, And California’S Failure To Implement Furman’S Narrowing Requirement, Catherine M. Grosso, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Michael Laurence, David C. Baldus, George W. Woodworth, Richard Newell

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the possible racial and ethnic implications of California’s expansive death penalty statute in light of the Eighth Amendment’s requirement that each state statute narrow the subclass of offenders on whom a death sentence may be imposed. The narrowing requirement derives from the holding in Furman v. Georgia over forty-five years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that existing death penalty statutes violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. Citing statistics demonstrating arbitrary and capricious application of capital punishment, a majority of the Justices concluded that a death sentencing scheme is unconstitutional if it …

The End Of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas, Ben Grunwald, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012.

Our results suggest …

Police Contact And The Legal Socialization Of Urban Teens, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary American policing has routinized involuntary police contacts with young people through frequent, sometimes intrusive investigative stops. Personal experience with the police has the potential to corrode adolescents’ relationships with law and skew law-related behaviors. We use the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate how adolescents’ experiences with the police shape their legal socialization. We find that both personal and vicarious police contact are associated with increased legal cynicism. Associations are present across racial groups and are not explained by teens’ behaviors, school settings, or family backgrounds. Legal cynicism is amplified in teens reporting intrusive contact but diminished …

Is Korematsu Good Law?, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

In Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court claimed to overrule its infamous Korematsu decision. This Essay argues that this claim is both empty and grotesque. It is empty because a decision to overrule a prior case is not meaningful unless it specifies which propositions the Court is disavowing. Korematsu stands for many propositions, not all of which are agreed upon, but the Hawaii Court underspecifies what it meant to overrule. The Court’s claim of overruling Korematsu is grotesque because its emptiness means to conceal its disturbing affinity with that case.