Law Commons^™

Police Brutality And State-Sanctioned Violence In 21st Century America, Itohen Ihaza

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Misdemeanors By The Numbers, Sandra G. Mayson, Megan T. Stevenson

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent scholarship has underlined the importance of criminal misdemeanor law enforcement, including the impact of public-order policing on communities of color, the collateral consequences of misdemeanor arrest or conviction, and the use of misdemeanor prosecution to raise municipal revenue. But despite the fact that misdemeanors represent more than three-quarters of all criminal cases filed annually in the United States, our knowledge of misdemeanor case processing is based mostly on anecdote and extremely localized research. This Article represents the most substantial empirical analysis of misdemeanor case processing to date. Using multiple court-record datasets, covering several million cases across eight diverse jurisdictions, …

Law, Race, And The Epistemology Of Ignorance, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Philosophers and other theorists have developed the field of epistemology which is the study of human knowledge. Critical race theorists have begun to explore how epistemological theory and insights may illuminate the study of race, including the analysis of race and the law. Such use of epistemology is appropriate because theoretical work on knowledge can be used to advance one of the key goals of critical race theory which is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America. In this regard, philosophers and other theorists have …

The 'Other' Market, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

The hiring market for tenure-track non–legal writing positions is a world unto itself with its own lingo (i.e., “meat market” and “FAR form”), its own unwritten rules (i.e., “Do not have two first-year courses in your preferred teaching package.”), and carefully calibrated expectations for candidates and schools with respect to the process and timing of hiring. These norms and expectations are disseminated to the participants in this market through a relatively well-established set of feeder fellowships, visiting assistant professor programs, elite law schools, blogs, and academic literature on the subject.

But there is another market that goes on every year …

Law School News: Broadening The Perspective 12/04/2019, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Changing Student Body At The University Of Michigan Law School, David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

Most of the content of the memo that follows has been previously published in the article "Who We Were and Who We Are: How Michigan Law Students Have Changed Since the 1950s: Findings from 40 Years of Alumni Surveys." T. K. Adams, co-author. Law Quad. Notes 51, no. 1 (2009): 74-80, available through this website. This memo provides more detail about changing entry credentials and about the great expansion beginning in the 1970s in the numbers of women students and of racial/ethnic minority students. It also provides information not in the article about the patterns over time in students’ …

Bias In, Bias Out, Sandra G. Mason

AI-DR Collection

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impact. In response, critics advocate three strategies of resistance: (1) the exclusion of input factors that correlate closely with race, (2) adjustments to algorithmic design to equalize predictions across racial lines, and (3) rejection of algorithmic methods altogether.

This Article’s central claim is that these strategies are at best superficial and at worst counterproductive, because the source of racial inequality in risk assessment lies …

Interview With Khaled Beydoun, Khaled Beydoun, Nina Mozeihem, Samuel Bagenstos

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The following is a transcription of an interview with Professor Khaled Beydoun, conducted at the University of Michigan Law School on March 15, 2019. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Incorporating Social Justice Into The 1l Legal Writing Course: A Tool For Empowering Students Of Color And Of Historically Marginalized Groups And Improving Learning, Sha-Shana Crichton

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The media reports of police shootings of unarmed Black men and women; unprovoked attacks on innocent Jews, Muslims, religious minority groups, and LGBTQ persons; and current pervasive, divisive, and misogynistic rhetoric all cause fear and anxiety in impacted communities and frustrate other concerned citizens. Law students, and especially law students of color and of historically marginalized groups, are often directly or indirectly impacted by these reports and discrimination in all its iterations. As a result, they are stressed because they are fearful and anxious. Research shows that stress impairs learning and cognition. Research also shows that beneficial changes are made …

The Drug War In America: How Much Damage Has It Done, Sherrod D. Hollingshed

Honors College Theses

For decades, the War on Drugs has had a profound effect on the United States of America. The effects include high arrest rates, creation of private prisons, and unequal treatment of minorities by the Criminal Justice System. For the past several years, heightened attention has been paid to the War on Drugs. There have been calls to legalize certain drugs, such as marijuana, and calls to completely end the War on Drugs. The purpose of this study is to (1) study the history of the War on Drugs in America and discuss the effects that it has had on America, …

Policing Corporate Conduct Toward Minority Communities: An Insurance Law Perspective On The Use Of Race In Calculating Tort Damages, Dhruti J. Patel

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Courts commonly use U.S. Department of Labor actuarial tables, which explicitly take into account the race of the tort victim, to determine average national wage, work-life expectancy, and life expectancy. This practice has led to wide discrepancies between average damage awards for minority plaintiffs compared to white plaintiffs even if both plaintiffs are similarly situated. While recent legal scholarship criticizes the use of race-based tables and addresses the Equal Protection and incentive concerns such tables present, few courts have deviated from the explicit use of race in determining tort damages.

Though the use of demographic features, such as race, to …

Bias In, Bias Out, Sandra G. Mayson

Scholarly Works

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impact. In response, critics advocate three strategies of resistance: (1) the exclusion of input factors that correlate closely with race, (2) adjustments to algorithmic design to equalize predictions across racial lines, and (3) rejection of algorithmic methods altogether.

This Article’s central claim is that these strategies are at best superficial and at worst counterproductive, because the source of racial inequality in risk assessment lies …

Religious Courts In Secular Jurisdictions: How Jewish And Islamic Courts Adapt To Societal And Legal Norms, Rabea Benhalim

Publications

At first glance, religious courts, especially Sharia courts, seem incompatible with secular, democratic societies. Nevertheless, Jewish and Islamic courts operate in countries like the United States, England, and Israel. Scholarship on these religious courts has primarily focused on whether such religious legal pluralism promotes the value of religious freedom, and if so, whether these secular legal systems should accommodate the continued existence of these courts. This article shifts the inquiry to determine whether religious courts in these environments accommodate litigants’ popular opinions and the secular, procedural, and substantive justice norms of the country in which they are located. This article …

The Case For American Muslim Arbitration, Rabea Benhalim

Publications

This Article advocates for the creation of Muslim arbitral tribunals in the United States. These tribunals would better meet the needs of American Muslims, who currently bring their religious disputes to informal forums that lack transparency. Particularly problematic, these existing forums often apply legal precedent developed in majority-Muslim nations, without taking into consideration the changed circumstances of Muslim living as minorities in the United States. These interpretations of Islamic law can have especially negative impacts on women. American Muslim arbitration tribunals offer the potential to correct these inadequacies. Furthermore, a new arbitral system could better meet the needs of sophisticated …

Race Ipsa Loquitur, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The goal of this Article is to make the existence of invidious racial discrimination in the United States so palpable that it can no longer be denied. Part I argues that racial inequality is so pervasive, unconscious, and structural that it has simply become an assumed fixture of United States and is rarely even noticed. Section I.A describes the history of racial subordination in the United States. Section I.B invokes the concept of disparate impact to illustrate the continuing manifestations of invidious discrimination in contemporary culture. Part II describes the manner in which the culture nevertheless chooses to deny the …

Elizabeth Warren’S New Housing Proposal Is Actually A Brilliant Plan To Close The Racial Wealth Gap, Mehrsa Baradaran, Darrick Hamilton

Popular Media

Last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a $450 billion housing plan called the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act. The proposal is a comprehensive and bold step toward providing affordable housing for the most vulnerable Americans. The bill is the first since the Fair Housing Act with the explicit intent of redressing the iterative effects of our nation’s sordid history of housing discrimination. Critically, it has the potential to make a substantive dent in closing our enormous and persistent racial wealth gap.

Jury Selection In The Weeds: Whither The Democratic Shore?, Jeffrey Abramson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article reports on four federal jury challenges in which the trial judge or defendants retained the author to provide research on jury selection plans. The research shows a persistent and substantial loss of representation for African Americans and Hispanics on federal juries, even though no intentional discrimination took place. Problems with undeliverable jury summonses, as well as failure to respond to summonses, were the main causes of departures from the ideal of cross-sectional jury selection. However, a cramped understanding of what it takes for a defendant to prove that minority jurors were systematically excluded, as required by Duren v. …

Conscious Identity Performance, Leslie P. Culver

San Diego Law Review

Marginalized groups in the legal profession sometimes feel pressure to perform strategies to communicate their identity in a predominantly white legal profession. Relevant legal scholarship describes this phenomenon, for example, in terms such as covering and passing—largely forms of assimilation. The notion is that outsiders—women, people of color, LGBTQ—use these strategies to communicate with insiders—white, heterosexual, males—in ways designed to advance their status in the legal profession. This article expands on that scholarship by drawing on a theoretical framework that legal scholars have largely ignored: co-cultural theory. This interdisciplinary theory describes how non-dominant cultures communicate in a dominant society. In …

Reforming Property Law To Address Devastating Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

Tenancy-in-common ownership represents the most widespread form of common ownership of real property in the United States. Such ownership under the default rules also represents the most unstable ownership of real property in this country. Thousands of tenancy-in-common property owners, including members of many poor and minority families, have lost their commonly-owned property due to court-ordered, forced partition sales as well as much of their real estate wealth associated with such ownership as a result of such sales. Though some scholars and the media have highlighted how thousands of African-Americans have lost an untold amount of property and substantial real …

What About #Ustoo?: The Invisibility Of Race In The #Metoo Movement, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Women involved in the most recent wave of the #MeToo movement have rightly received praise for breaking long-held silences about harassment in the workplace. The movement, however, has also rightly received criticism for both initially ignoring the role that a woman of color played in founding the movement ten years earlier and in failing to recognize the unique forms of harassment and the heightened vulnerability to harassment that women of color frequently face in the workplace. This Essay highlights and analyzes critical points at which the contributions and experiences of women of color, particularly black women, were ignored in the …

Race, Poverty, And Bail: An Annotated Bibliography, Clanitra Stewart Nejdl

Northern Illinois University Law Review

On June 9, 2017, Illinois's Bail Reform Act of 2017 was signed into law by Governor Bruce Rauner. Among other important provisions, the Act creates a presumption that non-monetary release conditions will be granted for defendants, requires that a defendant be provided an attorney for bail determination hearings, provides a bail credit for certain offenses, and authorizes the Illinois Supreme Court to create a non-discriminatory statewide risk assessment tool that could be used to make bail determinations. Despite the crucial improvements to Illinois's bail system achieved through the Act, some advocates argue that further reforms are still needed to protect …

Batson For Judges, Police Officers & Teachers: Lessons In Democracy From The Jury Box, Stacy L. Hawkins

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In our representative democracy we guarantee equal participation for all, but we fall short of this promise in so many domains of our civic life. From the schoolhouse, to the jailhouse, to the courthouse, racial minorities are underrepresented among key public decision-makers, such as judges, police officers, and teachers. This gap between our aspirations for representative democracy and the reality that our judges, police officers, and teachers are often woefully under-representative of the racially diverse communities they serve leaves many citizens of color wanting for the democratic guarantee of equal participation. This critical failure of our democracy threatens to undermine …

Criminal Justice And The Mattering Of Lives, Deborah Tuerkheimer

Michigan Law Review

A review of James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

Section 2 After Section 5: Voting Rights And The Race To The Bottom, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Five years ago, Shelby County v. Holder released nine states and fifty-five smaller jurisdictions from the preclearance obligation set forth in section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). This obligation mandated that places with a history of discrimination in voting obtain federal approval—known as preclearance—before changing any electoral rule or procedure. Within hours of the Shelby County decision, jurisdictions began moving to reenact measures section 5 had specifically blocked. Others pressed forward with new rules that the VRA would have barred prior to Shelby County.

Reassessing American Democracy: The Enduring Challenge Of Racial Exclusion, Johanna Kalb, Didi Kuo

Michigan Law Review Online

American democracy is in trouble. Since the 2016 election, a sizable literature has developed that focuses on diagnosing and assessing the state of American democracy, most of which concludes that our system of government is in decline.[2] These authors point to the rise in party polarization, the increasingly bipartisan abandonment of the norms of the democratic process, the rise of populism, the degradation of the public sphere, and the proliferation of gerrymandered districts and voting restrictions to illustrate the breakdown. And while attributing varying levels of significance to these factors, a common theme is that American democracy, once stable, is …

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. …

Bias In, Bias Out, Sandra G. Mayson

All Faculty Scholarship

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impacts. In response, critics advocate three strategies of resistance: (1) the exclusion of input factors that correlate closely with race; (2) adjustments to algorithmic design to equalize predictions across racial lines; and (3) rejection of algorithmic methods altogether.

This Article’s central claim is that these strategies are at best superficial and at worst counterproductive because the source of racial inequality in risk assessment lies …

Gender And The Tournament: Reinventing Antidiscrimination Law In An Age Of Inequality, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

Since the 1970’s, antidiscrimination advocates have approached Title VII as though the impact of the law on minorities and women could be considered in isolation. This article argues that this is a mistake. Instead, Reinventing Antidiscrimination Law attempts to reclaim Title VII’s original approach, which justified efforts to dismantle segregated workplaces as necessary to both eliminate discrimination and promote economic growth. Using that approach, this Article is the first to consider how widespread corporate tournaments and growing gender disparities in the upper echelons of the economy are intrinsically intertwined, and how they undermine the core promises of antidiscrimination law. The …

Barriers To Higher Education: Underrepresented Minorities' Access To Uci, Kimberly Dennin

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Ever since the removal of Affirmative Action in California from Proposition 209, the UC system has struggled with increasing the enrollment numbers of underrepresented minorities on their campuses. In response to this, many of the UC schools are adopting different policies to help counteract the negative effects of Proposition 209. This paper examines the effects of Proposition 209 on the underrepresented minority population in the UC system, specifically focusing on the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The areas of focus for addressing the issues of Proposition 209 at UCI are outreach programs, admissions policies, and recruitment programs. This paper examines …

Are My Cornrows Unprofessional?: Title Vii's Narrow Application Of Grooming Policies, And Its Effect On Black Women's Natural Hair In The Workplace, Renee Henson

The Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Law Review

Employer grooming policies are ubiquitous and apply to all in the workplace, however, the hair standards within these policies do not permit women to wear a myriad of ethnic hairstyles at work. Banning ethnic hairstyles like braids, cornrows, and dreadlocks adversely and disproportionally affects black women. Banning ethnic styles because they are deemed unprofessional forces many black women to spend inordinate amounts of money and time to ensure their hair is “professional looking enough” to attain gainful employment and climb the corporate ladder. This article examines Title VII’s role in allowing this practice where black women are not permitted to …