Law Commons^™

The R-Word: A Tribute To Derrick Bell, Kenneth B. Nunn

UF Law Faculty Publications

Racism has become the “R-word,” an allegation that is so outrageous that it cannot even be spoken in public, let alone seriously addressed. In this brief exploration, I propose that it is exactly because racism continues to loom large in American society that talking about it has become taboo. In other words, banning the “R-word” serves a political function. It masks the failure of American society to confront the existence of racism and do something about its effects. Derrick Bell's path breaking work can be used to show why the focus of race discourse has moved from debating over what …

Collateral Consequences Of Criminal Convictions: Confronting Issues Of Race And Dignity, Michael Pinard

Michael Pinard

This article explores the racial dimensions of the various collateral consequences that attach to criminal convictions in the United States. The consequences include ineligibility for public and government-assisted housing, public benefits and various forms of employment, as well as civic exclusions such as ineligibility for jury service and felon disenfranchisement. To test its hypothesis that these penalties, both historically and contemporarily, are rooted in race, the article looks to England and Wales, Canada and South Africa. These countries have criminal justice systems similar to the United States’, have been influenced significantly by United States’ criminal justice practices in recent years, …

Racing Towards Colorblindness: Stereotype Threat And The Myth Of Meritocracy, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Education law and policy debates often focus on whether college and graduate school admissions offices should take race into account. Those who advocate for a strictly merits-based regime emphasize the importance of colorblindness. The call for colorblind admissions relies on the assumption that our current admissions criteria are fair measures, which accurately capture talent and ability. Recent social science research into standardized testing suggests that this is not the case.

Part I of this Article explores the psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat has been shown to detrimentally impact the performance of individuals from negatively stereotyped groups when performing …

A Multicultural Grassroots Effort To Reduce Ethnic And Racial Social Distance Among Middle School Students, Christopher Donoghue, David Brandwein

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Raising tolerance for people of different ethnic and racial groups is the goal of the Multicultural Mosaic program, a grass-roots multicultural education effort initiated by a small group of middle school teachers in a private school in the northeast. After years of enjoying the comforts of a modern, but European-based, curriculum, these teachers took the initiative to pursue an ambitious transformation of their entire school's approach to pedagogy. Not only would the English teachers introduce new texts by foreign authors and the social studies teachers introduce new materials on the history of non-Western cultures, but also the teachers of mathematics …

Loving Before And After The Law, Loving Before And After The Law, Angela P. Harris

Angela P Harris

No abstract provided.

Information Overload, Multi-Tasking, And The Socially Networked Jury: Why Prosecutors Should Approach The Media Gingerly, Andrew Taslitz

Andrew E. Taslitz

The rise of computer technology, the internet, rapid news dissemination, multi-tasking, and social networking have wrought changes in human psychology that alter how we process news media. More specifically, news coverage of high-profile trials necessarily focuses on emotionally-overwrought, attention-grabbing information disseminated to a public having little ability to process that information critically. The public’s capacity for empathy is likewise reduced, making it harder for trial processes to overcome the unfair prejudice created by the high-profile trial. Market forces magnify these changes. Free speech concerns limit the ability of the law to alter media coverage directly, and the tools available to …

The Desire For Whiteness: Can Law And Economics Explain It?, Shilpi Bhattacharya

Shilpi Bhattacharya

This paper provides a new theoretical perspective on colorism by considering it from an economic point of view. It relies on three theories of law and economics that explain racism. While critiquing these theories, it also extends them to evaluate colorism. Because these theories correlate race with skin color, in order to apply these theories to colorism, it distinguishes colorism from racism using the “desire for whiteness” (DFW) as a tool for analysis. Further, this paper provides a comparative perspective of colorism in the traditional American labor market (ALM) and the Indian arranged marriage ‘market’ (IAMM). It finds that: (a) …

Explicating Correlates Of Juvenile Offender Detention Length: The Impact Of Race, Mental Health Difficulties, Maltreatment, Offense Type, And Court Dispositions, Christopher A. Mallett, Patricia A. Stoddard Dare, Mamadou M. Seck

Social Work Faculty Publications

Detention and confinement are widely acknowledged juvenile justice system problems which require further research to understand the explanations for these outcomes. Existing juvenile court, mental health, and child welfare histories were used to explicate factors which predict detention length in this random sample of 342 youth from one large, urban Midwestern county in the United States. Data from this sample revealed eight variables which predict detention length. Legitimate predictors of longer detention length such as committing a personal crime or violating a court order were nearly as likely in this sample to predict detention length as other extra-legal predictors such …

The Supreme Court’S Analysis Of Issues Raised By Death Penalty Litigants In The Court's 2004 Term, Richard Klein

Richard Daniel Klein

No abstract provided.

Discrimination Cases In The 2001 Term Of The Supreme Court (Symposium: The Fourteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Eileen Kaufman

Eileen Kaufman

No abstract provided.

Aryans, Gender, And American Politics, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay discusses some of the ways in which the Aryan movement in America activates gendered beliefs for the goal of legal, political, and cultural transformation. In recent years, the community has moved from common law theories of white sovereignty to more robust forms of racial constitutionalism. The piece is drawn from "America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community" (forthcoming Harvard University Press, 2014).

A Conversation With President Obama: A Dialogue About Poverty, Race, And Class In Black America, Joseph K. Grant

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Salience Of Race, Deborah W. Post

Deborah W. Post

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Hon. Steven C. Gonzàlez

Seattle University Law Review

At Seattle University School of Law’s Symposium on Racial Bias and the Criminal Justice System, students, faculty, judges, scholars, lawyers, and community members gathered to address racial disparity in the criminal justice system and to explore ways to keep the promise of our democracy that we all are equal before the law. Race, ethnicity, skin color, and national origin profoundly influence our legal structure and our liberty. The way that race influences perceptions and actions is critically important in the context of our criminal justice system—a system that changes lives, disrupts and protects communities, and represents a key part of …

O.P.P.: How "Occupy's" Race-Based Privilege May Improve Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence For All, Lenese C. Herbert

Seattle University Law Review

This Article submits that Occupy’s race problem could, ironically, prove to be a solution if protesters grow more serious about exposing the injury of political subordination and systems of privilege that adhere to the criminal justice system. Privilege is a “systemic conferral of benefit and advantage [as a result of] affiliation, conscious or not and chosen or not, to the dominant side of a power system.” Accordingly, now that police mistreatment affects them personally, Occupy may finally help kill a fictitious Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that ignores oppression through improper policing based on racial stigma. Occupy may also help usher in …

Marketing Goods, Marketing Images: The Impact Of Advertising On Race, Deseriee A. Kennedy

Deseriee A. Kennedy

No abstract provided.

The Joke In Critical Race Theory: De Gustibus Disputandum Est?, Dan Subotnik

Dan Subotnik

No abstract provided.

S11rs Sgr No. 8 (Gender), Taylor, Hill, Voss, Lockwood, Kelly, Alexander, Wedig, Vaughn, Gist, Duckett, Bourg, Soileau, Hebert, Harding, Lemoine, Simon, Caffarel

Student Senate Enrolled Legislation

No abstract provided.

S11rs Sgr No. 23 (Tureaud), Hebert, Harding

Student Senate Enrolled Legislation

No abstract provided.

Re-Solidifying Racial Bloc Voting: Empirics And Legal Doctrine In The Melting Pot, D. James Greiner

Indiana Law Journal

Racial bloc voting is the central concept in judicial regulation of redistricting. For the past several decades, the definition and proof of this concept have depended on two premises: that polities can be conceptualized in biracial terms and that nearly perfect information on voting patterns can be inexpensively obtained from simple statistical methods. In fact, however, neither premise has been true for some time, as the nation has become multiracial and allegations have increased that Caucasians vote less monolithically than before, with both assertions imposing severe stress on the simple statistical methods previously used to assess voting patterns. In this …

On Race, Gender, And Radical Tort Reform: A Review Of Martha Chamallas & Jennifer B. Wriggins, The Measure Of Injury: Race, Gender, And Tort Law, Vincent R. Johnson

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Collateral Consequences, Genetic Surveillance, And The New Biopolitics Of Race, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article is part of a Howard Law Journal Symposium on “Collateral Consequences: Who Really Pays the Price for Criminal Justice?,” as well as my larger book project, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011). It considers state and federal government expansion of genetic surveillance as a collateral consequence of a criminal record in the context of a new biopolitics of race in America. Part I reviews the expansion of DNA data banking by states and the federal government, extending the collateral impact of a criminal record—in the form …

Critical Race Theory – The Last Voyage, Dan Subotnik

Dan Subotnik

No abstract provided.

Painting Beyond The Numbers: The Art Of Providing Inclusive Law School Admissions To Ensure Full Representation In The Profession, Paula Lustbader

Paula Lustbader

The issue of increasing diversity in the profession and the law schools is still timely. In his column for the March 2011 American Bar Association Journal, the ABA President calls for more “to be done to make the legal profession more fully reflect the communities it serves.” In addition, the Society of American Law Teachers is currently preparing to proposal to make to the ABA Accreditation Committee regarding the use of Law School Admission Tests scores and minimum Bar Passage Rates requirements. Many law schools and other institutions of higher learning are wrestling with the issue of diversity and admissions …

Other Civil Rights Decisions In The October 2005 Term: Title Vii, Idea, And Section 1981(Eighteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Eileen Kaufman

Eileen Kaufman

No abstract provided.

Discrimination Cases In The October 2004 Term, Eileen Kaufman

Eileen Kaufman

No abstract provided.

Employment Discrimination And Presidential Immunity Cases, Eileen Kaufman

Eileen Kaufman

No abstract provided.

Discrimination Cases In The 2000 Term, Eileen Kaufman

Eileen Kaufman

No abstract provided.

Discrimination Cases Of The 2002 Term (Symposium: The Fifteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Eileen Kaufman

Eileen Kaufman

No abstract provided.

Are Law Schools Racist?: A "Talk" With Richard Delgado (Symposium: Deconstructing Race: When Reasonable Minds Differ), Dan Subotnik

Dan Subotnik

No abstract provided.