Law Commons^™

Law School News: Should Prison Be Abolished? 10-6-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Colorblind Capture, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

We are facing two converging waves of racial retrenchment. The first, which arose following the Civil Rights Movement, is nearing a legal milestone. This term or the next, the Supreme Court will prohibit affirmative action in higher education. When it does, the Court will cement decades of conservative jurisprudence that has systematically eroded the right to remedy racial inequality.

The second wave is more recent but no less significant. Following 2020’s global uprising for racial justice, rightwing forces launched a coordinated assault on antiracism itself. The campaign has enjoyed early success. As one measure, GOP officials have passed, proposed or …

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

Articles

Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

The Racial Politics Of Fair Use Fetishism, Anjali Vats

Articles

This short essay argues that the sometimes fetishistic desire on the part of progressive intellectual property scholars to defend fair use is at odds with racial justice. Through a rereading of landmark fair use cases using tools drawing from Critical Race Intellectual Property (“CRTIP”), it contends that scholars, lawyers, judges, practitioners, and activists would be well served by focusing on how fair use remains grounded in whiteness as (intellectual) property. It argues for doing so by rethinking the purpose of the Copyright Act of 1976 to be inclusive of Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors.

What Is Cultural Misappropriation And Why Does It Matter? 03-31-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Decolonizing Indigenous Migration, Angela R. Riley, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

As global attention turns increasingly to issues of migration, the Indigenous identity of migrants often remains invisible. At the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, a significant number of the individuals now being detained are people of indigenous origin, whether Kekchi, Mam, Achi, Ixil, Awakatek, Jakaltek or Qanjobal, coming from communities in Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries. They may be leaving their homelands precisely because their rights as Indigenous Peoples, for example the right to occupy land collectively and without forcible removal, have been violated. But once they reach the United States, they are treated as any other migrants, without regard …

Law School News: 'Injustice Dehumanizes Everyone It Touches' 1-31-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The 15th Annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Keynote Address 1-28-2020, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Andrea Hansen

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Dismantling “Dilemmas Of Difference” In The Workplace, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Sarah Heberlig, Lindsay Holcomb

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the course of six months, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s class “Women, Law, and Leadership” interviewed 55 women between the ages of 25 and 85, all leaders in their respective fields. Nearly half of the women interviewed were women of color, and 10 of the women lived and worked in countries other than the U.S., spanning across Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Threading together the common themes touched upon in these conversations, we gleaned a number of novel insights, distinguishing the leadership trajectories pursued by women who have risen to the heights of their professions. Through thousands …

Child Migrants And America’S Evolving Immigration Mission, Shani M. King

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores the many challenges—legal and otherwise—that child migrants face as they attempt to navigate the complex web of courts, laws, and shifting political landscapes to become naturalized United States citizens, while putting these challenges in the context of an immigration system that has long been shaped by politics of exclusion and xenophobia that have shaped immigration law and policy in the United States for over one-hundred years. Such an investigation comes at a time when the issue of immigration in the United States is increasingly complex and contested. As the Trump administration mulls over new prototypes for a …

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 …

Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond's masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee's urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted's readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between "law on the books" and "law-in-action." Its most …

Independence And Immigration, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law: The Magazine Of Roger Williams University School Of Law (Issue 9) (2016), Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

Prison Segregation: Symposium Introduction And Preliminary Data On Racial Disparities, Margo Schlanger

Articles

For this Introduction, I undertake to look a bit more broadly at recent data. The best sources of demographic information about prisoners are the various surveys and censuses conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). While no BJS publication directly addresses the issue, and no BJS dataset allows its full analysis, it is possible to glean something from the most recent BJS prison census, the 2005 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities.

Paper Thin: Freedom And Re-Enslavement In The Diaspora Of The Haitian Revolution, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carre and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified …

Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.

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

Faculty Scholarship

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, …

She...Refuses To Deliver Up Herself As The Slave Of Your Petitioner': Émigrés, Enslavement, And The 1808 Louisiana Digest Of The Civil Laws (Symposium On The Bicentennial Of The Digest Of 1808--Collected Papers), Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Philosophically and juridically, the construct of a slave-a "person with a price"--contains multiple ambiguities. Placing the category of slave among the distinctions of persons "established by law," the 1808 Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Termtoiy of Orleans recognized that "slave" is not a natural category, inhering in human beings. It is an agreement among other human beings to treat one of their fellows as property. But the Digest did not specify how such a property right came into existence in a given instance. The definition of a slave was simply ostensive, pointing toward rather than …

Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

From French and Creole to Spanish, the domain of the Napoleonic Empire to the king of Spain, crossing the strait separating the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the Spanish colony of Cuba entailed a change of language and government. Some 18,000 people made that transition between the spring and summer of 1803 during the Revolutionary War in Saint-Dominque. Six years later, many crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to New Orleans and the recently acquired Louisiana Territory under the authority of a territorial governor and the United States Congress. What would these crossings lead to for those who had …

Agenda: The Climate Of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock, University Of Colorado Boulder. School Of Law

The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock (March 16-17)

On March 16-17, The Climate of Environmental Justice: Taking Stock conference gathered 125 academics and practitioners from around the country to consider the pressing issues facing low-income and/or communities of color that continue to be subjected to a disproportionate share of environmental maladies.

"Some people are more equal than others when it comes to bracing ourselves for the impacts of climate change," said conference organizer Professor Maxine Burkett. "Whether it's because poor folks lived in the lowest areas of New Orleans when Katrina floodwaters rushed in, or are less able to afford the cooling bill during increasingly frequent heat waves, …

Crossing Borders: Loving V. Virginia As A Story Of Migration, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

The struggle of binational same-gender partners today parallels the struggles of Mildred and Richard Loving during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement - not only in the obvious parallels between race and sexual orientation as barriers to freedom, but also in the way the law uses these immutable characteristics to limit the freedom of movement. It is this freedom of movement - this migration or immigration - that I want to focus on in this essay. Lest we forget, the Lovings' story is, importantly, a story of migration: It's a story of the great lengths to which an interracial …

A Domestic Right Of Return?: Race, Rights, And Residency In New Orleans In The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article begins with a critical account of what occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This critique serves as the backdrop for a discussion of whether there are international laws or norms that give poor, black Katrina victims the right to return to and resettle in New Orleans. In framing this discussion, this article first briefly explores some of the housing deprivations suffered by Katrina survivors that have led to widespread displacement and dispossession. The article then discusses two of the chief barriers to the return of poor blacks to New Orleans: the broad perception of a race-crime nexus …

A Cuban Connection: Edwin F. Atkins, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., And The Former Slaves Of Soledad Plantation, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Edwin F. Atkins and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., stand out on this stage not as major players but as a particularly intriguing Boston connection. Among the truly major players, planters like Juli?n Zulueta and the Count of Casa More owned hundreds of slaves and shaped Spanish policy. On the Cuban nationalist side, few could equal the impact of Antonio Maceo, the mulato insurgent general who insisted on full emancipation at the end of the 1868-1878 war, or the thousands of rebels who fought under the orders of rebel generals Maceo and Maximo Gomez. As the master of some ninety-five patrocinados …

Race Discrimination And Human Rights Class Actions: The Virtual Exclusion Of Racial Minorities From The Class Action Device, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the era of Jim Crow, racial minorities were segregated and excluded from participating in white society. Minorities were segregated in public schools, excluded from public accommodations, excluded from participation on juries, and excluded from living in certain areas. Harkening back to that earlier time, racial minorities now are often excluded from using the class action device to bring civil rights claims.

This paper argues that courts are very tough in how they handle class certification decisions in race discrimination class actions. On the other hand, the courts are quite lenient in how they handle class certification decisions in human …

"The Dean Of Chicago's Black Lawyers": Earl Dickerson And Civil Rights Lawyering In The Years Before Brown, Jay Tidmarsh, Stephen Robinson

Journal Articles

Brown v. Board of Education is a watershed in American law and society. In the years since it was decided, Brown has shaped America's views of race, constitutionalism, and equality. Brown exerts an equally important influence over the historiography of civil rights lawyering in the decades before Brown. In particular, in constructing the story of civil rights lawyering in the crucial years between World War I and World War II, historians and legal scholars have focused primarily on the people and the events that shaped Brown.

The Provincial Archive As A Place Of Memory: The Role Of Former Slaves In The Cuban War Of Independence (1895-98), Rebecca Scott

Book Chapters

Prof. Scott focuses on the study of the role of former slaves in the Cuban War of Independence, in light of the avoidance of the theme of race within this war in Cuban historiography. She discusses reasons for the silence on race issues, and for the historic construction of the "myth" of racial equality in this era.

Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery.

Exploring White Resistance To Racial Reconciliation In The United States, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Unexplainable On Grounds Other Than Race": The Inversion Of Privilege And Subordination In Equal Protection Jurisprudence, Darren Lenard Hutchinson

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this article, Professor Darren Hutchinson contributes to the debate over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause by arguing that the Supreme Court has inverted its purpose and effect. Professor Hutchinson contends that the Court, in its judicial capacity, provides protection and judicial solicitude for privileged and powerful groups in our country, while at the same time requires traditionally subordinated and oppressed groups to utilize the political process to seek redress for acts of oppression. According to Professor Hutchinson, this process allows social structures of oppression and subordination to remain intact.

First, Professor Hutchinson examines the various …