Law Commons^™

Roger Williams University Commencement Exercises : Class Of 2024 : May 17, 2024, Roger Williams University

School of Law Commencement (1996- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Leadership And Vision: Jonte T. Mckenzie L'24, Michelle Choate

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Colorblind And Color Mute: Words Unspoken In U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments, Chris Chambers Goodman

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The U.S. Supreme Court holds oral arguments on 70 to 80 cases each year, with fewer than a dozen most years involving issues around race or ethnicity. When the salience of race is clear, Supreme Court observers would expect to hear racial terms used in the arguments by counsel, as well as in the Justice’s questions.

Surprisingly, this research study demonstrates that is not the case. These racial terms - such as color, discriminate, minority, race, and its various related terms like racial, racially, racist, as well as combinations like race-neutral, and race-blind - only sparsely appear in oral argument …

Law School News: Rwu School Of Law Launches Institute For Race And The Law And Celebrates Champions For Justice 3-22-2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: From The Community, For The Community 1/21/24, Suzi Morales, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Housing Equity In Golden Gate Village, Nicole White

Social Justice | Senior Theses

For generations, the African American community has faced many forms of housing discrimination that have created major inequalities in their everyday lived experiences (Lockwood, 2020). This study explores the long-lasting effects of discriminatory housing policies in creating disparate housing conditions within the public housing community in Marin City called Golden Gate Village, as well as the role of the Marin Housing Authority in practices of displacement and neglect. The methodology for the study included seven different interviews with Golden Gate Village residents to obtain knowledge about the community as well as grasp an understanding of the lived experiences of the …

Subjectively Speaking, The Applicable Standard For Deficient Medical Treatment Of Pretrial Detainees Should Be One Of Objective Reasonableness, Benjamin R. Black

Touro Law Review

There is no uniformity amongst the circuits when it comes to pretrial detainees claims for inadequate medical care. The circuits are currently grappling with this problem, applying two separate tests to pretrial detainees’ 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claims depending on the jurisdiction in which the incident arose. The test that should be applied across all circuits is one of objective reasonableness. However, some circuits do not see it that way, applying the deliberate indifference standard, also known as the subjective standard test. The circuits applying the subjective standard are relying on case law that does not properly analyze the rights …

Affirming And Supporting Black Women’S Lactation Agency As Redress, Dorothy Couchman

San Diego Law Review

This Article opens with Truth baring her breasts for four reasons. First, for many women like Truth who survived enslavement, lactation was a specifically gendered and racialized site of atrocity. Under chattel slavery in the United States, enslaved women were prevented from breastfeeding their infants as needed, compelled to wean their children far too early at the demands of their enslavers, or made to wet-nurse their enslavers’ White children in place of their own. This lactational coercion was part of a larger atrocity of reproductive abuse perpetuated against enslaved women.

Second, as Truth notes, enslaved women’s children were harmed when …

No Apology Until Abolition: Redressing The Ongoing Atrocity Of Slavery, Brandee Mcgee

San Diego Law Review

There are currently more Black adults under correctional control than there were enslaved at the height of slavery. Despite Black Americans making up only 12% of the domestic population, states imprison them at more than five times the rate of White Americans. In California, the ratio is even higher: the “Black/‌white disparity [is] larger than 9:1.” Although many White Americans are also imprisoned, Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow argues that these White prisoners are “collateral damage” to mask a racialized prison-industrial complex (PIC)—with mass incarceration as the main feature.

In 1865, after decades of activism by the abolitionist …

The Impact Of Government Sponsored Segregation On Health Inequities: Addressing Death Gaps Through Reparations, Mariya Denisenko

Washington and Lee Law Review

Government sponsored segregation of urban neighborhoods has detrimentally impacted the health of Black Americans. Over the last century, federal, state, and local governments have promulgated racist laws and policies that shaped the racial divide of communities in major metropolitan cities. This divide has contributed to poor health outcomes and large discrepancies in life expectancy for Black Americans when compared to their White counterparts. While health is impacted by various factors, segregation has been shown to impose various challenges that make it difficult for Black Americans to attain good health.

Segregated Black communities struggle with economic inequality, environmental racism, and face …

Politics Of Refusal: Justice And Liberation For Black Trans Lives, Quincy Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the challenges faced by Black trans people. In this thesis, I will explore how protest is used to highlight and confront the obstacles faced by the Black trans community. I will also examine the cultural work of Black trans people and what they teach us. The Brooklyn Liberation march and the TV show Pose is an important part of Black trans legacy. They both look at the complications surrounding Black trans lives and contributes to Black trans representation in protesting and fighting marginalization. This thesis will argue the importance of allyship to create safe space for Black …

Reinvest In Us: Reimagine The Role Of Police In The U.S., Jamil Davis

College Honors Program

In America, we must question and understand what is “law and order.” Over centuries, America developed a racialized slave-class politically and socially through power and force. Police are the foot soldiers of maintaining law and order as Slave Patrols evolved into the State Police. In my thesis, I discuss how their efforts in traffic enforcement enable a dominant class to target and enslave the oppressed class. Traffic control leads to 18 million interactions a year which is 34 people a minute. The numbers of interactions along with persistent practices regarding discrimination cause police to be a social liability. When bad …

The Hyper-Incarceration Of Female Minority Juvenile Offenders Within The Juvenile And Criminal Justice Systems, Ruth C.A. Philippe

Selected Honors Theses

Young women are the fastest-growing portion of the juvenile justice system population. Girls experience risk factors at higher rates than boys, exhibit mental health issues at higher rates than boys, suffer more negative consequences from justice system involvement than system-involved boys, and are less likely to access treatment than boys. Girls are also more likely to become involved with the justice system for minor offenses such as running away or skipping school. In particular, young women of color receive unfair treatment than their counterparts. Girls of color are disadvantaged and treated differently within both the juvenile and criminal justice systems …

Healthcare Inequities In The United States And Beyond Are Taking Black Women’S Lives, Alichia Mcintosh

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Black women have been dying at devastating rates due to health complications at the hands of the United States’ healthcare and legal systems. This Note explores these distressing rates and how they compare to White women while analyzing the fatalities and diagnoses among several health complications and diseases. These fatalities persist due to the United States’ history of racism—such as the institution of slavery and over 100 years of Black bodies experiencing Jim Crow laws—and the socioeconomic disadvantages Black women disproportionally face. This Note emphasizes that these disparities continue because the United States has failed to implement treaties—which it is …

Law School News: A Voice For Justice 3-1-2023, Janine L. Weisman, Roger Williams University School O Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

It is my great good fortune to have been asked to comment on the remarkable Article Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights from Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals by Judge Jeremy D. Fogel, Professor Mary S. Hoopes, and Justice Goodwin Liu. Drawing on a rich vein of data gathered pursuant to a carefully crafted research design and extensive interviews, the authors provide the most detailed account to date regarding the selection criteria used by federal appeals court judges to select their law clerks. The authors pay special attention to the role that diversity plays in picking …

Teaching Slavery In Commercial Law, Carliss N. Chatman

Scholarly Articles

Public status shapes private ordering. Personhood status, conferred or acknowledged by the state, determines whether one is a party to or the object of a contract. For much of our nation’s history, the law deemed all persons of African descent to have a limited status, if given personhood at all. The property and partial personhood status of African-Americans, combined with standards developed to facilitate the growth of the international commodities market for products including cotton, contributed to the current beliefs of business investors and even how communities of color are still governed and supported. The impact of that shift in …

Taking The Knee No More: Police Accountability And The Structure Of Racism, David Dante Troutt

Washington and Lee Law Review

From before the birth of the republic to the present day, police brutality has represented a signature injustice of state authority, especially against African Americans. Defining that injustice is the lack of accountability for official misconduct. The rule of law has systematically failed to deter lawbreaking by its law enforcement departments. This Article explores the various legal and institutional means by which accountability should be imposed and demonstrates the design elements of structured immunity. Using Critical Race Theory and traditional civil rights law notions of how structural racism operates, this Article argues that transformative change can only come about through …

Sheriffs, Shills, Or Just Paying The Bills?: Rethinking The Merits Of Compelling Merchant Cooperation With Third-Party Policing In The Aftermath Of George Floyd’S Death, Stephen Wilks

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article frames the killing of George Floyd as the result of flawed business regulation. More specifically, it captures the expansion of third-party policing paradigms throughout local nuisance abatement regulations over a period of time that coincided with the militarization of policing culture across the United States. Premised on the notion that law enforcement alone cannot succeed in reducing crime and disorder, such regulations transform grocery stores, pharmacies, bars, and other retail spaces into surveillance hubs by prescribing situations that obligate businesses to contact the police. This regulatory framework, however, sustains the larger historical project of rationalizing enhanced scrutiny of …

Higher Education Redress Statutes: A Critical Analysis Of States’ Reparations In Higher Education, Christopher L. Mathis

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article introduces a novel concept, higher education redress statutes (“HERS”), to illustrate efforts that acknowledge and amend past wrongs towards African Americans. More proximally, the Article shines a probing light on the escalation of HERS in southeastern states that serve as a site for state regulation and monitoring. The Author exposes how higher education redress statutes, designed to provide relief or remedy to Black people for states’ higher education’s harm, categorically ignore groups of Black people who rightfully should also be members of the statutorily protected class. This Article queries whether legislators can expand the scope of such statutes …

Check Your Bank Account First: Examining Copyright Formalities And Remedies Through A Race Conscious Lens, Emma Burri

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note examines copyright formalities through a race conscious lens and concludes that further change is necessary given the legacy of economic inequality that communities of color experience. It examines the history of copyright formalities in the United States and the disenfranchisement of Black musical creators through the theft of their intellectual property. In exploring the relationship between race, wealth, and musical copyright protection this Note explains why considering the economic inequality is relevant to ensure copyright protection for Black creators. This Note proposes abolishing the registration timeline for certain remedies and altering the filing fee structure of the copyright …

White Picket Fences & Suburban Gatekeeping: How Long Island’S Land Use Laws Cement Its Status As One Of The Most Segregated Places In America, Jessica Mingrino

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The average wealth of Black families is one-seventh that of white families in the United States today. Homeownership—the primary avenue through which Americans accumulate personal and generational wealth—is the leading driver of the wealth disparity between white and Black American families, known as the “racial wealth gap.” The systematic and intentional exclusion of Black people from developing communities during the twentieth century largely excluded people of color from the housing boom and denied them the opportunity afforded to white people to multiply their assets. Contrary to widespread belief, however, legislation-backed oppression of Black Americans did not end in the …

The Problem Of Blackness In America: Becoming When The Being Never Comes To Be, Nkiru Anyaegbunam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The problem of Blackness in America is a consequence of the historical reality and continued legacies of colonialism, the triangular trade and chattel slavery that have been facilitated through violence and capitalism. This thesis will argue that this problem that is pronounced through racialized institutional systems of violence such as mass incarceration and housing inequality, which disproportionately negatively impacts Black Americans is part of a larger discourse on the human and (mis)recognition. This violence has created a quintessential incompleteness for Black Americans who neither are recognized as citizens nor human. The problem of Blackness will be continuously grounded in this …

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Gregory W. Bowman, Brooklyn Crockton

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Color Of Pain: Racial Bias In Pain And Suffering Damages, Maytal Gilboa

Georgia Law Review

For more than half a century, our legal system has formally eschewed race-based discrimination, and nearly every field of law has evolved to increase protections for minority groups historically burdened by racial prejudice. Yet, even today, juries in tort actions routinely consider a plaintiff’s race when calculating compensatory tort damages, and they do so in a manner that systematically results in lower awards to Black plaintiffs than to White. This Article examines this problem, zeroing in on the specific issue of racial bias in calculations of tort damages for pain and suffering.

The severity of a plaintiff’s injury is commonly …

The Chief Justice And The Page: Earl Warren, Charles Bush, And The Promise Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

In October Term 1954, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding the implementation of the Brown decision. The resulting opinion is commonly referred to as “Brown II.” In his unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered local school districts to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Supporters of immediate integration were dismayed by the vague language, which ultimately allowed southern states to use a variety of tactics to deliberately evade and resist the Court’s mandate that public schools be desegregated.

What has been forgotten in the discussion of Brown II and the “all deliberate speed” standard is that …

Movement Constitutionalism, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

The white supremacy at the heart of the American criminal legal system works to control Black, Brown, and poor people through mass incarceration. Poverty and incarceration act in a vicious circle, with reactionaries mounting a desperate defense against any attempt to mitigate economic exploitation or carceral violence. Ending the cycle will require replacing this inequitable system with the life- and liberty-affirming institutions of abolition democracy. The path to abolition democracy is arduous, but abolitionists can press for change through what I coin “movement constitutionalism.” Movement constitutionalism is the process by which grassroots abolitionist movements shift—through demands and in solidarity with …

Whiteness As Contract, Marissa Jackson Sow

Washington and Lee Law Review

2020 forced scholars, policymakers, and activists alike to grapple with the impact of “twin pandemics”—the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated Black and Indigenous communities, and the scourge of structural and physical state violence against those same communities—on American society. As atrocious acts of anti-Black violence and harassment by law enforcement officers and white civilians are captured on recording devices, the gap between Black people’s human and civil rights and their living conditions has become readily apparent. Less visible human rights abuses camouflaged as private commercial matters, and thus out of the reach of the state, are also increasingly exposed as …

Let's Talk: An Analysis Of The Psychological And Emotional Impacts Of The Police Talk On Black Children, Kaila T. Glover Dodson

Scripps Senior Theses

The ‘Talk’ is a conversation (or series of conversations) that Black children receive from parents, grandparents, and other guardians and caretakers in their life. The conversation consists of informing them on behaviors to adopt as well as a script to recite should they encounter the police or any other agent of the law. Very little research has been done on the Talk yet alone the impact it has on Black children. Pulling from research on racial socialization, moral development, and the impact of racism on one’s well being, the purpose of this study is to explore how Black children are …

Which America?: Judge Roger L. Gregory And The Tradition Of African-American Political Thought, Daniel Fryer

Washington and Lee Law Review

In this Article, written in connection with a symposium honoring Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory’s twenty years on the bench, I place Judge Gregory’s jurisprudence within the tradition of African-American political thought. I suggest that, at bottom, Judge Gregory has a leveling-up jurisprudence that seeks to interpret the Constitution in a way that ensures the least well-off in society are granted the same rights as the most privileged. This brand of democratic theorizing approximates a mainstream position by Black political theorists optimistically seeking to have the least well-off integrated into a fully equal society. By comparing and contrasting his work …