Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons^™

Keynote: How I Became A Family Policing Abolitionist, Dorothy E. Roberts

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This piece is a written version of Professor Dorothy Roberts' keynote speech at the Columbia Journal of Race and Law's 11th annual symposium, titled Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being.

The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin

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The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation’s highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live in …

Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri

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Marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—is, and always has been, deeply intertwined with inequalities of race, class, gender, and region. Many if not most of the plaintiffs who challenged legal discrimination based on family status in the 1960s and 1970s were impoverished women, men, and children of color who made constitutional equality claims. Yet the constitutional law of the family is largely silent about the status-based impact of laws that prefer marriage and disadvantage non-marital families. While some lower courts engaged with race-, sex-, and wealth-based discrimination arguments in family status cases, the Supreme Court largely avoided recognizing, much less …

Crossing Two Color Lines: Interracial Marriage And Residential Segregation In Chicago, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Residential segregation and antimiscegenation were interwined means of maintaining an unequal racial order, challenging both sociological theories about immigrant assimilation and upward mobility and legal theories about the significance of interracial marriage for racial equality.

The Role Of Personal Laws In Creating A “Second Sex”, Rangita De Silva De Alwis, Indira Jaising

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The cultural construction of gender determines the role of women and girls within the family in many societies. Gendered notions of power in the family are often shrouded in religion and custom and find their deepest expression in Personal Laws. This essay examines the international law framework as it relates to personal laws and the commonality of narratives of litigators and plaintiffs in the cases from the three different personal law systems in India.

Marriage (In)Equality And The Historical Legacies Of Feminism, Serena Mayeri

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In this essay, I measure the majority’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges against two legacies of second-wave feminist legal advocacy: the largely successful campaign to make civil marriage formally gender-neutral; and the lesser-known struggle against laws and practices that penalized women who lived their lives outside of marriage. Obergefell obliquely acknowledges marriage equality’s debt to the first legacy without explicitly adopting sex equality arguments against same-sex marriage bans. The legacy of feminist campaigns for nonmarital equality, by contrast, is absent from Obergefell’s reasoning and belied by rhetoric that both glorifies marriage and implicitly disparages nonmarriage. Even so, the history …

Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri

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Despite a transformative half century of social change, marital status still matters. The marriage equality movement has drawn attention to the many benefits conferred in law by marriage at a time when the “marriage gap” between affluent and poor Americans widens and rates of nonmarital childbearing soar. This Essay explores the contested history of marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—through the lens of the “illegitimacy” cases of the 1960s and 1970s. Often remembered as a triumph for nonmarital families, these decisions defined the constitutional harm of illegitimacy classifications as the unjust punishment of innocent children for the “sins” of their …

Reconciling Equal Protection Law In The Public And In The Family: The Role Of Racial Politics, Dorothy E. Roberts

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In Constitutional Colorblindness and the Family, Katie Eyer brings to our attention an intriguing contradiction in the Supreme Court's equal protection jurisprudence. Far from ending race‐based family law rules with its 1967 decision, Loving v. Virginia, the Court has ignored lower courts' decisions approving official uses of race in foster care, adoption, and custody decisions in the last half century. Thus, as Eyer observes, “during the same time that the Supreme Court has increasingly proclaimed the need to strictly scrutinize all government uses of race, family law has remained a bastion of racial permissiveness.”

Scholars who oppose race‐matching …

Prison, Foster Care, And The Systemic Punishment Of Black Mothers, Dorothy E. Roberts

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This article is part of a UCLA Law Review symposium, “Overpoliced and Underprotected: Women, Race, and Criminalization.” It analyzes how the U.S. prison and foster care systems work together to punish black mothers in a way that helps to preserve race, gender, and class inequalities in a neoliberal age. The intersection of these systems is only one example of many forms of overpolicing that overlap and converge in the lives of poor women of color. I examine the statistical overlap between the prison and foster care populations, the simultaneous explosion of both systems in recent decades, the injuries that each …

Collegiality And Individual Dignity, Tobias Barrington Wolff

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This Essay identifies and describes the tension between the norms of collegiality and basic principles of individual dignity that LGBT scholars and lawyers encounter when confronted with the dehumanizing arguments that are regularly advanced by opponents of equal treatment under law for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. It is a transcript of remarks delivered at a March 2012 symposium on the Defense of Marriage Act at Fordham Law School, with minimal edits for publication.

Collateral Consequences, Genetic Surveillance, And The New Biopolitics Of Race, Dorothy E. Roberts

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This Article is part of a Howard Law Journal Symposium on “Collateral Consequences: Who Really Pays the Price for Criminal Justice?,” as well as my larger book project, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011). It considers state and federal government expansion of genetic surveillance as a collateral consequence of a criminal record in the context of a new biopolitics of race in America. Part I reviews the expansion of DNA data banking by states and the federal government, extending the collateral impact of a criminal record—in the form …

Significant Statistics: The Unwitting Policy Making Of Mathematically Ignorant Judges, Michael I. Meyerson, William Meyerson

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This article will explore several areas in which judges, hampered by their mathematical ignorance, have permitted numerical analysis to subvert the goals of our legal system. In Part II, I will examine the perversion of the presumption of innocence in paternity cases, where courts make the counter-factual assumption that regardless of the evidence, prior to DNA testing, a suspect has a 50/50 chance of being the father. In Part III, I will explore the unnecessary injection of race into trials involving the statistics of DNA matching, even when race is entirely irrelevant to the particular case. Next, in Part IV, …

Foreword Symposium: Having It Our Way: Women In Maryland's Workplace Circa 2027, Margaret E. Johnson

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On November 14, 2007, the University of Baltimore School of Law, the University of Maryland School of Law and the Women's Law Center of Maryland co-sponsored a symposium entitled "Having it Our Way: Women in Maryland's Workplace Circa 2027." The insightful collection of papers in this volume of the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class represents the work of employment law scholars, public policy specialists, and activists who presented on the current state of Maryland employment law and discussed Maryland's future. This distinguished group of experts and scholars present several themes: the hope of new …

Race, Gender, And Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Medical Hope, Legal Pitfalls: Potential Legal Issues In The Emerging Field Of Oncofertility, Gregory Dolin, Dorothy E. Roberts, Lina M. Rodriguez, Teresa K. Woodruff

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The article will begin its discussion by identifying the values at stake in the field of oncofertility. These values include the constitutional protection of the rights of women and minors to bear children and to use reproduction-assisting technologies, as well as the feminist critique of gendered expectations that may pressure women to use these technologies.

Part III will focus on the medical options of oncofertility. It will also discuss some conditions that may lead otherwise fertile and young patients to lose their ability to bear children as a side-effect of necessary medical treatment. The article will then proceed to discuss …

Engines Of Inequality: Class, Race, And Family Structure, Amy L. Wax

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The past 30 years have witnessed a dramatic divergence in family structure by social class, income, education, and race. This article reviews the data on these trends, explores their significance, and assesses social scientists’ recent attempts to explain them. The article concludes that society-wide changes in economic conditions or social expectations cannot account for these patterns. Rather, for reasons that are poorly understood, cultural disparities have emerged by class and race in attitudes and behaviors surrounding family, sexuality, and reproduction. These disparities will likely fuel social and economic inequality and contribute to disparities in children’s life prospects for decades to …

The Community Dimension Of State Child Protection, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Black Club Women And Child Welfare: Lessons For Modern Reform, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

The Recently Revised Marriage Law Of China: The Promise And The Reality, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Rangita De Silva De Alwis

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In April 2001, the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People's Congress (NPC), China's highest legislative body, passed the long-debated and much awaited amendments to the Marriage Law on the closing day of its twenty-first session. As stated by one PRC commentator, "In the 50 years since the founding of the New China, there has not been any law that has caused such a widespread concern for ordinary people."'

Even though the recent revisions to the marriage laws have been hailed as some of the most significant and positive changes in family law in China, thus far no empirical evaluation …

Child Welfare And Civil Rights, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Criminal Justice And Black Families: The Collateral Damage Of Over-Enforcement, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Nest Eggs And Stormy Weather: Law, Culture, And Black Women's Lack Of Wealth, Regina Austin

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No abstract provided.

A Feminist Social Justice Approach To Reproduction-Assisting Technologies: A Case Study On The Limits Of Liberal Theory, Joan C. Callahan, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Race And The New Reproduction, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.

Territoriality And Moral Dissensus: Thoughts On Abortion, Slavery, Gay Marriage And Family Values, Seth F. Kreimer

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No abstract provided.

Myths And Moms: Images Of Women And Termination Of Parental Rights, Odeana R. Neal

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For most of us, the word "mother" evokes a myriad of often conflicting images and emotions, expectations and disappointments, and gratitude and blame. What a mother is - our own mothers and the class of people who are mothers - means much more than that a woman has given birth. We expect mothers to provide their children with all the love, caring, nurturing, and emotional fulfillment that we perceive those children need and desire; we expect her to be all things that we want her to be when we need her to be them. A woman who can fulfill the …

Surrogacy, Slavery, And The Ownership Of Life, Anita L. Allen

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No abstract provided.

The Court Acknowledges The Illegitimate: Levy V. Louisiana And Glona V. American Guarantee & Liability Insurance Co., John C. Gray Jr., David Rudovsky

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No abstract provided.