Law Commons^™

Law School News: Commencement 2023: Rwu Graduates Urged To 'Work Hard And Dream Big Dreams' 5-19-2023, Jill Pais, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications For Law, Carmen G. Gonzalez, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

The theory of racial capitalism offers insights into the relationship between class and race, providing both a structural and a historical account of the ways in which the two are linked in the global economy. Law plays an important role in this. This article sketches what we believe are two key structural features of racial capitalism: profit-making and race-making for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, …

Fair Housing’S Third Act: American Tragedy Or Triumph?, Heather R. Abraham

Journal Articles

Fifty-two years ago, Congress enacted a one-of-a-kind civil rights directive. It requires every federal agency—and state and local grantees by extension—to take affirmative steps to undo segregation. In 2020, this overlooked Fair Housing Act provision—the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” or “AFFH” mandate—has heightened relevance. Perhaps most visible is Donald Trump’s racially charged “protect the suburbs” campaign rhetoric. In an apparent appeal to suburban constituents, his administration repealed a race-conscious fair housing rule, replacing it with a no-questions-asked regulation that elevates “local control” above civil rights.

The maneuver is especially stark as protesters fill the streets, marching in opposition to systemic …

White Parents Searching For White Public Schools, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The New White Flight makes two significant contributions to our understanding of race and education. First, it argues that white parents chose to send their children to segregated, disproportionately white schools. This choice is reflected in white residential preferences for areas where "pricing-out mechanisms" ensure that the local school is disproportionately white. (P. 254.) This racially-motivated choice holds "even when school quality is controlled for, meaning that whites tend to choose predominately white schools even when presented with the choice of a more integrated school that is of good academic quality." (P. 236.) Second, it shows how charter schools give …

Tear It All Down: Highways As Racist Monuments, Sarah Schindler

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In recent months, citizens and elected officials around the country have been tearing down or ordering the removal of monuments that symbolize white supremacy and subjugation. While many of the targeted monuments are statues of people who supported or espoused racist ideologies, another set of more innocuous monuments to racial segregation still stand: America’s Highways.

Law School News: Remembering John Lewis 07-18-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

In West Philadelphia Born And Raised Or Moving To Bel-Air? Racial Steering As A Consequence Of Using Race Data On Real Estate Websites, Nadiyah J. Humber

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reconceptualizing The Harms Of Discrimination: How Brown V. Board Of Education Helped To Further White Supremacy, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, literature has played a vital role in revealing weaknesses in law. The classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is no different. The long-revered work of fiction contains several key scenes that illuminate significant gaps in the analysis of one of our most celebrated decisions: Brown v. Board of Education, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that state-mandated racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. In particular, the novel opens a pathway that enables its readers to visualize the full harms of white supremacy, which include …

Fear Of A Multiracial Planet: Loving'S Children And The Genocide Of The White Race, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that prohibitions against interracial marriages were unconstitutional, strong cultural opposition to interracial couples, marriages, and families continues to exist. Illustrative of this opposition is the controversy over an Old Navy clothing store advertisement posted on Twitter in spring 2016. The advertisement depicted an African American woman and a white man together with a presumably mixed-race child. The white man is carrying the boy on his back. It is a clear depiction of an interracial family. Although seemingly innocuous, this advertisement sparked a flood of comments expressing open hostility …

Newsroom: Have We Outgrown Brown? 02-06-2018, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

A Painful History : Symbols Of The Confederacy: A Conversation About The Tension Between Preserving History And Declaring Contemporary Values 1-19-2018, Michael M. Bowden

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Newsroom: A Painful History 1-19-2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Feminism And The Tournament, Jessica A. Clarke

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Naomi Bishop, the protagonist of the 2016 film "Equity," is the rare "she-wolf of Wall Street."' At the beginning of the film, Bishop appears on a panel at an alumni event. She explains her career choices to the young women in the audience as follows: I like money. I do. I like numbers. I like negotiating. I love a challenge. Turning a no into a yes. But I really do like money. I like knowing that I have it. I grew up in a house where there was never enough. I was raised by a single mom with four kids. …

Race, Rhetoric, And Judicial Opinions: Missouri As A Case Study, Brad Desnoyer, Anne Alexander

Faculty Publications

This Essay studies the relationship between race, rhetoric, and history in three twentieth century segregation cases: State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Kraemer v. Shelley, and Liddell v. Board of Education. Part I gives a brief overview of the scholarship of Critical Race Theory, majoritarian narratives and minority counter-narratives, and the judiciary’s rhetoric in race-based cases. Part II analyzes the narratives and language of Gaines, Kraemer, and Liddell, provides the social context of these cases, and traces their historical outcomes.

The Essay contends that majoritarian narratives with problematic themes continue to perpetuate even though court opinions have evolved to use …

New Policing, New Segregation: From Ferguson To New York, Jeffrey Fagan, Elliott Ash

Faculty Scholarship

In popular and political culture, many observers credit nearly twenty-five years of declining crime rates to the “New Policing.” Breaking with a past tradition of “reactive policing,” the New Policing emphasizes advanced statistical metrics, new forms of organizational accountability, and aggressive tactical enforcement of minor crimes. The existing research and scholarship on these developments have focused mostly on the nation’s major cities, where concentrated populations and elevated crime rates provide pressurized laboratories for police experimentation, often in the spotlight of political scrutiny. An additional line of scholarship has looked more closely at how the tactics of the New Policing have …

Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over The Constitutional Meaning Of Equality, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Diversity Without Integration, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

The de facto racial segregation pervasive at colleges and universities across the country undermines a necessary precondition for the diversity benefits embraced by the Court in Grutter — the requirement that students partake in high-quality interracial interactions and social relationships with one another. This disjuncture between Grutter’s vision of universities as sites of robust cross-racial exchange and the reality of racial separation should be of great concern, not just because of its potential constitutional implications for affirmative action but also because it reifies racial hierarchy and reinforces inequality. Drawing from an extensive body of social science research, this article explains …

The Ironies Of Affirmative Action, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s most recent confrontation with race-based affirmative action, Fisher v. University of Texas, did not live up to people’s expectations—or their fears. The Court did not explicitly change the current approach in any substantial way. It did, however, signal that it wants race-based affirmative action to be subject to real strict scrutiny, not the watered-down version featured in Grutter v. Bollinger. That is a significant signal, because under real strict scrutiny, almost all race-based affirmative action programs are likely unconstitutional. This is especially true given the conceptual framework the Court has created for such programs—the way …

The Case Of Dixon V. Alabama: From Civil Rights To Students' Rights And Back Again, Philip Lee

Journal Articles

On February 25, 1960, African American students from Alabama State College participated in a sit-in at a segregated lunch grill at the Montgomery County Courthouse. The lunch grill refused to serve the students and ordered them to leave. The students left and went to the courthouse corridor, where they remained for an hour before going back to campus.

When Alabama State College learned of the students’ actions, it summarily expelled them without notice or hearing. In expelling the students, the college relied on Alabama State Board of Education regulations that allowed it to expel students for “conduct unbecoming a student …

Integration Reclaimed: A Review Of Gary Peller's Critical Race Consciousness, Michelle Adams

Articles

Integration occupies a contested and often paradoxical place in legal and public policy scholarship and the American imagination. Today, more Americans are committed to integration than ever before. Yet this attachment to integration is hardly robust. There is a widespread perception that integration has failed. A vanishingly small percentage of social and economic resources are spent on integration. At the same time, some progressives and those who would otherwise consider themselves on the "left" criticize integration as insufficiently attentive to economic equality and dismissive of black identity and culture. Scholars from across the political spectrum have sought to explain this …

Ut Case Was Stop On Road To Brown V. Board Of Education, Thomas D. Russell

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

“Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice” is Gary Lavergne’s treatment of Sweatt v. Painter, an important 1950 Supreme Court decision on the way to Brown. Lavergne, director of admissions research at the University of Texas, tells an interesting and important story that fills many gaps between Plessy and Brown.

Racial Inclusion, Exclusion And Segregation In Constitutional Law, Michelle Adams

Articles

In Part I of the Article, I examine early cases in which the Court described segregation as a form of resource "lock-up." In several cases leading up to Brown, the Court detailed how racial segregation allows a more dominant group to hoard substantial societal resources. In these early cases, the Court's focus was on segregation as a mechanism for excluding individuals from valuable benefits on the basis of race; it did not speak explicitly to the harms associated with racial classification schemes. In this Part of the Article, I also return to Brown v. Board of Education and explore the …

Ua5/3 University Attorney - Committee File, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Unprocessed committee files created by the University Attorney. Committees include the Council on Higher Education Special Committee on Minority Affairs, Administrative Council and Teacher Admissions, Certification, and Student Teaching Committee. This record group is unprocessed and must be reviewed for potential restricted materials before access is granted. Please contact the University Archivist prior to your visit.

Sustaining Tiered Personhood: Jim Crow And Anti-Immigrant Laws, Karla M. Mckanders

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Latino immigrants are moving to areas of the country that have not seen a major influx of immigrants. As a result of this influx, citizens of these formerly homogenous communities have become increasingly critical of federal immigration law. State and local legislatures are responding by passing their own laws targeting immigrants. While many legislators and city council members state that the purpose of the anti-immigrant laws is to restrict illegal immigration where the federal government has failed to do so, opponents claim that the laws are passed to enable discrimination and exclusion of all Latinos, regardless of their immigration status. …

Public Rights, Social Equality, And The Conceptual Roots Of The Plessy Challenge, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This Article argues that the test case that gave rise to the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson is best understood as part of a wellestablished, cosmopolitan tradition of anticaste activism in Louisiana rather than as a quixotic effort that contradicted nineteenth-century ideas of the boundaries of citizens' rights. By drawing a dividing line between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and social rights, on the other, the Supreme Court construed challenges to segregation as claims to a "social equality" that was beyond the scope of judicially cognizable rights. The Louisiana constitutional convention of 1867-68, however, had defined …

Regulating White Desire, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article contends that segregationist justifications for miscegenation and segregation laws shows that those laws effectively imposed a legal duty on whites to adhere to cultural norms of endogamy. Dominant social groups enforce rules of endogamy⁠—the cultural practice of encouraging people to marry within their own social group⁠—to protect the dominant status of their individual members and of the social group in general. Thus, laws prohibiting interracial marriages regulated white desire in order to protect the dominant status of whites as a group. The Loving Court, therefore, ultimately was correct in declaring that miscegenation laws denied blacks equal protection.

Part …

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 Sweet Trials: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The automobile and manufacturing boom that began in Detroit about 1915 made the city a magnet for blacks fleeing the economic stagnation of the South. In the decade from 1915 to 1925, Detroit's black population grew more than tenfold, from 7,000 to 82,000. A severe housing shortage developed, as the city's compact black district could not accommodate all the new arrivals. Blacks brave enough to purchase or rent homes in previously all-white neighborhoods faced intimidation and violence. The spring and summer of 1925 saw several ugly housing-related incidents. It was in this violent summer of 1925 that a black doctor …

Interracial Marriage In The Shadows Of Jim Crow: Racial Segregation As A System Of Racial And Gender Subordination, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Essay works through essentialist language to reveal the multidimensional nature of racial segregation as a system of subordination. Specifically, it examines how racial segregation in public schools and laws prohibiting interracial marriage mutually reinforce racial and gender inequality. Part I discusses Brown and the traditional analysis of that decision as a case dealing with race, racial stigma, and equal educational opportunity. Part II reviews laws prohibiting interracial marriage, the reasoning and purpose behind these laws, and the Loving decision that rendered such laws unconstitutional. Part III then examines racial segregation in public schools as more than just a system …

For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This review essay analyzes Derrick Bell's provocative new book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2004). In Silent Covenants, Professor Bell reviews Brown v. Board of Education, and inquires "whether another approach than the one embraced by the Brown decision might have been more effective and less disruptive in the always-contentious racial arena." Specifically, Professor Bell joins black conservatives in critiquing what he describes as a misguided focus on achieving racial balance in schools and argues that the quality of education for minority children, in particular Blacks, would have been better today …