Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Civil Rights and Discrimination

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor Jun 2022

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …


Rewriting Whren V. United States, Jonathan Feingold, Devon Carbado Apr 2022

Rewriting Whren V. United States, Jonathan Feingold, Devon Carbado

Faculty Scholarship

In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States—a unanimous opinion in which the Court effectively constitutionalized racial profiling. Despite its enduring consequences, Whren remains good law today. This Article rewrites the opinion. We do so, in part, to demonstrate how one might incorporate racial justice concerns into Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, a body of law that has long elided and marginalized the racialized dimensions of policing. A separate aim is to reveal the “false necessity” of the Whren outcome. The fact that Whren was unanimous, and that even progressive Justices signed on, might lead one to conclude that …


"Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got To Go!": The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument, Karen Pita Loor Oct 2021

"Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! These Mass Arrests Have Got To Go!": The Expressive Fourth Amendment Argument, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

The racial justice protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 constitute the largest protest movement in the United States. Estimates suggest that between fifteen and twenty-six million people protested across the country during the summer of 2020 alone. Not only were the number of protestors staggering, but so were the number of arrests. Within one week of when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, police arrested ten thousand people demanding justice on American streets, with police often arresting activists en masse. This Essay explores mass arrests and how they square with Fourth Amendment …


The Trauma Of Awakening To Racism: Did The Tragic Killing Of George Floyd Result In Cultural Trauma For Whites?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig Apr 2021

The Trauma Of Awakening To Racism: Did The Tragic Killing Of George Floyd Result In Cultural Trauma For Whites?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

The act of witnessing the killing of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old, African-American father, brother, partner, and son, at the hands of the police caused many white individuals to experience an epiphany about racism, specifically structural racism, in the United States. Following the horrific killing of George Floyd, many white people began to shift their thinking about the existence and prevalence of racialized police brutality, reconsidering the manner in which they had always viewed the world around them. Indeed, many white individuals began to recognize and acknowledge the varied ways in which whiteness worked to privilege them in our society, even …


Racial Character Evidence In Police Killing Cases, Jasmine Gonzales Rose Jan 2018

Racial Character Evidence In Police Killing Cases, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is facing a twofold crisis: police killings of people of color and unaccountability for these killings in the criminal justice system. In many instances, the officers’ use of deadly force is captured on video and often appears clearly unjustified, but grand and petit juries still fail to indict and convict, leaving many baffled. This Article provides an explanation for these failures: juror reliance on “racial character evidence.” Too often, jurors consider race as evidence in criminal trials, particularly in police killing cases where the victim was a person of color. Instead of focusing on admissible evidence, jurors …