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Full-Text Articles in Law
Fairness In The Exceptions: Trusting Juries On Matters Of Race, Virginia Weeks
Fairness In The Exceptions: Trusting Juries On Matters Of Race, Virginia Weeks
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Implicit bias research indicates that despite our expressly endorsed values, Americans share a pervasive bias disfavoring Black Americans and favoring White Americans. This bias permeates legislative as well as judicial decision-making, leading to the possibility of verdicts against Black defendants that are tainted with racial bias. The Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado provides an ex post remedy for blatant racism that impacts jury verdicts, while jury nullification provides an ex ante remedy by empowering jurors to reject convicting Black defendants when to do so would reinforce racially biased laws. Both remedies exist alongside a trend limiting the …
Racial Cartels, Daria Roithmayr
Racial Cartels, Daria Roithmayr
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article argues that we can better understand the dynamic of historical racial exclusion if we describe it as the anti-competitive work of "racial cartels." We can define racial cartels to include a range of all-White groups - homeowners' associations, school districts, trade unions, real estate boards and political parties - who gained signficant social, economic and political profit from excluding on the basis of race. Far from operating on the basis of irrational animus, racial cartels actually derived significant profit from racial exclusion. By creating racially segmented housing markets, for example, exclusive White homeowners' associations enjoyed higher property values …
Separate And Unequal: Federal Tough-On-Guns Program Targets Minority Communities For Selective Enforcement, Bonita R. Gardner
Separate And Unequal: Federal Tough-On-Guns Program Targets Minority Communities For Selective Enforcement, Bonita R. Gardner
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article examines the Project Safe Neighborhoods program and considers whether its disproportionate application in urban, majority- African American cities (large and small) violates the guarantee of equal protection under the law. This Article will start with a description of the program and how it operates-the limited application to street-level criminal activity in predominately African American communities. Based on preliminary data showing that Project Safe Neighborhoods disproportionately impacts African Americans, the Article turns to an analysis of the applicable law. Most courts have analyzed Project Safe Neighborhoods' race-based challenges under selective prosecution case law, which requires a showing by the …
Vigilante Racism: The De-Americanization Of Immigrant America, Bill Ong Hing
Vigilante Racism: The De-Americanization Of Immigrant America, Bill Ong Hing
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Sadly, the de-Americanization process is capable of reinventing itself generation after generation. We have seen this exclusionary process aimed at those of Jewish, Asian, Mexican, Haitian, and other descent throughout the nation's history. De-Americanization is not simply xenophobia, because more than fear of foreigners is at work. This is a brand of nativism cloaked in a Euro-centric sense of America that combines hate and racial profiling. Whenever we go through a period of de-Americanization like what is currently happening to South Asians, Arabs, Muslim Americans, and people like Wen Ho Lee-a whole new generation of Americans sees that exclusion and …
"Suitable Targets"? Parallels And Connections Between "Hate" Crimes And "Driving While Black", Lu-In Wang
"Suitable Targets"? Parallels And Connections Between "Hate" Crimes And "Driving While Black", Lu-In Wang
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Essay seeks to show that there is less to some of these apparent differences than meets the eye. While hate crimes may tend to be less routine and more violent than discriminatory traffic stops, closer examination of each shows the need to complicate our understanding of both. The work of social scientists who have studied bias-motivated violence and of legal scholars who have studied racial profiling- prominent among them my fellow panelist, Professor David A. Harris- reveals striking similarities and connections between the two practices. In particular, both hate crimes and racial profiling tend to be condemned only at …
Transnational Critical Race Scholarship: Transcending Ethnic And National Chauvinism In The Era Of Globalization, Ibrahim J. Gassama
Transnational Critical Race Scholarship: Transcending Ethnic And National Chauvinism In The Era Of Globalization, Ibrahim J. Gassama
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Eric Yamamoto's article, Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering Practice in Post-Civil Rights America, brings a needed perspective to scholarship seeking to place domestic social justice struggles within the context of a broader and more complex mix of forces at play. While Yamamoto does not highlight a critical transnational perspective in this particular article, he writes from a perspective that presumes transnational analysis is essential in making sense of the socio-economic and political forces affecting our lives as individuals and members of multiple, intersecting communities. The local, the national, and the international are inextricably bound and present …
Deconstructing The Ideology Of White Aesthetics, John M. Kang
Deconstructing The Ideology Of White Aesthetics, John M. Kang
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
In this Article, the author provides a discussion on the dynamic between race and aesthetics. The author states that because Whites are the dominant group in America, they dictate what is beautiful. The consequence of this power dynamic is that the dominant group, Whites, can exercise preferences in deciding how to look or express themselves, whereas people of color are limited to either conforming to an imposed White standard or rejecting it. The author starts by laying out some of the features to what he terms the "ideology of White aesthetics." He then commences to examine how this ideology has …
In Sisterhood, Lisa C. Ikemoto
In Sisterhood, Lisa C. Ikemoto
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
A review of Where Is Your Body? by Mari Matsuda
The Color Of Truth: Race And The Assessment Of Credibility, Sheri Lynn Johnson
The Color Of Truth: Race And The Assessment Of Credibility, Sheri Lynn Johnson
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This article will address specifically the relationship between race and credibility in legal cases, while acknowledging that broader bias issues are often, though sometimes imperceptibly, intertwined in racially biased credibility determinations. Part I will survey race and credibility issues that have arisen in courts, with particular focus on two modern habeas corpus cases. Part II will summarize the legal rules that presently regulate racially influenced assessments of credibility; it may surprise some readers to realize that there is no established mechanism for challenging racially biased credibility determinations. Part I will propose some standards for determining when race is permissibly used …
The Social Construction Of Identity In Criminal Cases: Cinema Verité And The Pedagogy Of Vincent Chin, Paula C. Johnson
The Social Construction Of Identity In Criminal Cases: Cinema Verité And The Pedagogy Of Vincent Chin, Paula C. Johnson
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This article will discuss the use of the film, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, as a method: (1) to analyze the relationship of social constructions of identity, particularly race, on the rules and discretionary application of criminal jurisprudence; (2) to provide an interactive pedagogical tool for law teachers, especially criminal law teachers, to examine the social contexts of criminal jurisprudence from multiple perspectives; and (3) to examine the ability of criminal law doctrine to address issues of race.