Law Commons^™

#Blacklivesmatter: From Protest To Policy, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In summer 2020, mass protests spread across the globe challenging police brutality and racial injustice and demanding change. Fueled by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, these protests drew 15 million to 26 million participants in the United States alone to participate in late May and June of 2020. The sheer scale of these protests made them the largest movement in U.S. history. While there has been some consensus that this unprecedented protest movement pushed social awareness and changed the national conversation around race, existing research has yet to clearly …

Co-Creating A Legal Check-Up In A School-Based Health Center Serving Low-Income Adolescents, Lisa Kessler, Yael Cannon, Nicole Tuchinda, Ana Caskin, Christina Balz Ndjatou, Vicki W. Girard, Deborah F. Perry

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Problem: Marginalized populations experience health-harming legal needs—barriers to good health that require legal advocacy to overcome. Medical–legal partnerships (MLPs) embed lawyers into the healthcare team to resolve these issues, but identifying patients with health-harming legal needs is complex, and screening practices vary across MLPs.

Purpose of Article: Academic and community partners who collaborate in an MLP at a school-based health center (SBHC) share their process of co-creating a two-stage legal check-up for adolescents.

Key Points: Screening adolescents for health-harming legal needs is challenging. It took ongoing collaboration to refine the process to fit the needs of …

#Blacklivesmatter—Getting From Contemporary Social Movements To Structural Change, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

From the haters and hackers to propaganda and privacy concerns, social media often deserves its bad reputation. But the sustained activism that followed George Floyd’s death and the ongoing movement for racial justice also demonstrated how social media can be a crucial mechanism of social change. We saw how online and on-the-ground activism can fuel each other and build momentum in ways neither can achieve in isolation. We have seen in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and more specifically the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, a new and powerful approach to using social media that goes beyond symbolic “slacktivism” and performative allyship …

The Corruption Of Copyright And Returning It To Its Original Purposes, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since its inception, Copyright has had two purposes: the private interest of the author in being paid for her work and the public interest served by the dissemination of these works. Within the last two decades, though, some industries have systematically undermined both of those interests, redirecting the benefits of copyright towards themselves instead of the intended beneficiaries. This paper looks at the book, music, and entertainment industries, examines how copyright has been used to suppress the uses it was intended to foster, and explores ongoing and proposed avenues for course correction.

Massive Resistance--The Remix: Anti-Black Policymaking And The Poisoning Of U.S. Public Education, Janel George

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What is occurring today in state legislatures and school boards around the country—under the guise of conservative attacks on Critical Race Theory—is merely a remix of the same song of white supremacy in public education. This nation has witnessed the impact of legislative campaigns designed to undermine educational opportunity for Black students before. This article applies a Critical Race Theory approach to analyze the role of law and policy in replicating racial inequality in education. This article asserts that policymakers seeking to preserve white supremacy in education have invoked three primary legislative tactics over the years: (1) denying; (2) defunding; …