Law Commons^™

Race-Ing Antitrust, I. Bennett Capers, Gregory Day

Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust law has a race problem. To spot an antitrust violation, courts inquire into whether an act has degraded consumer welfare. Since anticompetitive practices are often assumed to enhance consumer welfare, antitrust offenses are rarely found. Key to this framework is that antitrust treats all consumers monolithically; that consumers are differently situated, especially along lines of race, simply is ignored.

We argue that antitrust law must disaggregate the term “consumer” to include those who disproportionately suffer from anticompetitive practices via a community welfare standard. As a starting point, we demonstrate that anticompetitive conduct has specifically been used as a tool …

Policing "Bad" Mothers, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers — a speculative novel about a mother who abandons her child for a few hours and is required to attend a school for good mothers to regain custody — may not be a great book, but it is a good yarn, and a page turner, and thought-provoking. Thought-provoking, because to measure her fitness to be a mother, the protagonist is assigned a robot doppelganger of her child — one that is sentient, one that seems almost real, one that might even pass the Turing test, and one that she is required not only …

Race, Gatekeeping, Magical Words, And The Rules Of Evidence, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

Although it might not be apparent from the Federal Rules of Evidence themselves, or the common law that preceded them, there is a long history in this country of tying evidence—what is deemed relevant, what is deemed trustworthy—to race. And increasingly, evidence scholars are excavating that history. Indeed, not just excavating, but showing how that history has racial effects that continue into the present.

One area that has escaped racialized scrutiny—at least of the type I am interested in—is that of expert testimony. In this brief Essay written for the Vanderbilt Law Review Symposium, Reimagining the Rules of Evidence at …