Law and Race Commons^™

In The Dark – Pushing The Boundaries Of True Crime, Sharon Davis

RadioDoc Review

True crime podcasts are a burgeoning genre. As journalists and storytellers, how do we balance the pursuit of justice and our responsibility to the victims with the demand to tell a gripping tale? As listeners, are we using the pain of others for our own entertainment? In the Dark podcast (Seasons 1 and 2) takes us beyond a vicarious fascination with true crime stories into a forensic and essential look at deep-rooted biases, corruption and systemic failures that prevent justice from being served.

The first season (2016) investigates the 1989 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling In …

A Socio-Demographic Analysis Of Responses To Terrorism, Gabriel Rubin, Christopher Salvatore

Christopher Salvatore

Extensive research has found that there are differences in reported levels of fear of crime and associated protective actions influenced by socio-demographic characteristics such as race and gender. Further studies, the majority of which focused on violent and property crime, have found that specific demographic characteristics influence fear of crime and protective behaviors. However, little research has focused on the influence of socio-demographic characteristics on perceptions, and protective actions in response to the threat of terrorism. Using data from the General Social Survey, this study compared individual-level protective actions and perceptions of the effectiveness of protective responses to the 9/11 …

Children Of A Lesser God: Reconceptualizing Race In Immigration Law, Sarah L. Hamilton-Jiang

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The increased public exposure to the experiences of Latinx unaccompanied children seeking entry at the United States southern border has revealed the lived reality of the nation’s pernicious immigration laws. The harrowing experiences of unaccompanied children are amplified by their interaction with a legal system plagued by a legacy of systemic racism and sustained racial caste. While immigration law currently affords minimal legal protections for these children, in application, the law continues to fall egregiously short of providing for the safety of unaccompanied children. Though critics have long attested to the legal system’s neglect of unaccompanied children, subsequent legal analysis …

Handcuffing The Vote: Diluting Minority Voting Power Through Prison Gerrymandering And Felon Disenfranchisement, Rebecca Harrison Stevens, Meagan Taylor Harding, Joaquin Gonzalez, Emily Eby

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

For the purposes of legislative redistricting, Texas counts prison populations at the address of the prison in which they are incarcerated at the time of the census, rather than their home prior to incarceration—regardless of whether the prisoners themselves maintain a residence in their home communities and intend to return home after incarceration. This deprives those home communities of full representation in the redistricting process. Combined with Texas’s felon disenfranchisement laws, this also results in arbitrarily bolstering the representational power of some Texans on the backs of other Texans who themselves are unable to vote. All of this takes place …

Challenging Voting Rights And Political Participation In State Courts, Irving Joyner

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming

Still Writing At The Master’S Table: Decolonizing Rhetoric In Legal Writing For A “Woke” Legal Academy, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the author wrote Writing At the Master’s Table: Reflections on Theft, Criminality, and Otherness in the Legal Writing Profession almost 10 years ago, her aim was to bring a Critical Race Theory/Feminism (CRTF) analysis to scholarship about the marginalization of White women law professors of legal writing. She focused on the convergence of race, gender, and status to highlight the distinct inequities women of color face in entering their ranks. The author's concern was that barriers to entry for women of color made it less likely that the existing legal writing professorate, predominantly White and female, would problematize the …

Latino Education In Texas: A History Of Systematic Recycling Discrimination, Albert H. Kauffman

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Dorothy R. Crockett Classroom Dedication September 10, 2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Lorraine Lalli, Bre'anna Metts-Nixon, Michael M. Bowden

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Rwu Law Will Dedicate Classroom To Ri's First African-American Woman Lawyer 9-4-2019, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Complicated Lives: Free Blacks In Virginia, 1619-1865, Sherri L. Burr

Faculty Book Display Case

Would the United States have developed differently if Virginia had not passed a law in 1670 proclaiming all subsequently arriving Africans as servants for life, or slaves? What if the state had not stripped all Free Blacks and Indians of voting rights in 1723, or outlawed interracial sex for 337 years?

Complicated Lives upends the pervasive belief that all Africans landing on the shores of Virginia beginning in late August 1619, became slaves. In reality, many of these kidnap victims received the status of indentured servants. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of free African Americans in the South and North owned …

Abolitionist Feminism As Prisons Close: Fighting The Racist And Misogynist Surveillance “Child Welfare” System, Venezia Michalsen

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The global prison industrial complex was built on Black and brown women’s bodies. This economy will not voluntarily loosen its hold on the bodies that feed it. White carceral feminists traditionally encourage State punishment, while anti-carceral, intersectional feminism recognizes that it empowers an ineffective and racist system. In fact, it is built on the criminalization of women’s survival strategies, creating a “victimization to prison pipeline.” But prisons are not the root of the problem; rather, they are a manifestation of the over-policing of Black women’s bodies, poverty, and motherhood. Such State surveillance will continue unless we disrupt these powerful systems …

Texas Indian Holocaust And Survival: Mcallen Grace Brethren Church V. Salazar, Milo Colton

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the first Europeans entered the land that would one day be called Texas, they found a place that contained more Indian tribes than any other would-be American state at the time. At the turn of the twentieth century, the federal government documented that American Indians in Texas were nearly extinct, decreasing in number from 708 people in 1890 to 470 in 1900. A century later, the U.S. census recorded an explosion in the American Indian population living in Texas at 215,599 people. By 2010, that population jumped to 315,264 people.

Part One of this Article chronicles the forces contributing …

'Race, Racism, And American Law': A Seminar From The Indigenous, Black, And Immigrant Legal Perspectives, Eduardo R.C. Capulong, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Flagrant racism has characterized the Trump era from the onset. Beginning with the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has inflamed long-festering racial wounds and unleashed White supremacist reaction to the nation’s first Black President, in the process destabilizing our sense of the nation’s racial progress and upending core principles of legality, equality, and justice. As law professors, we sought to rise to these challenges and prepare the next generation of lawyers to succeed in a different and more polarized future. Our shared commitment resulted in a new course, “Race, Racism, and American Law,” in which we sought to explore the roots …

“It’S Hard Out Here If You’Re A Black Felon”: A Critical Examination Of Black Male Reentry, Jason M. Williams, Sean K. Wilson, Carrie Bergeson

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Formerly incarcerated Black males face many barriers once they return to society after incarceration. Research has long established incarceration as a determinant of poor health and well-being. While research has shown that legally created barriers (e.g., employment, housing, and social services) are often a challenge post-incarceration, far less is known of Black male’s daily experiences of reentry. Utilizing critical ethnography and semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated Black males in a Northeastern community, this study examines the challenges Black males experience post-incarceration.

Race As A Carceral Terrain: Black Lives Matter Meets Reentry, Jason Williams

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the United States, racialized people are disproportionately selected for punishment. Examining punishment discourses intersectionally unearths profound, unequal distinctions when controlling for the variety of victims’ identities within the punishment regime. For example, trans women of color are likely to face the harshest of realities when confronted with the prospect of punishment. However, missing from much of the academic carceral literature is a critical perspective situated in racialized epistemic frameworks. If racialized individuals are more likely to be affected by punishment systems, then, certainly, they are the foremost experts on what those realities are like. The Black Lives Matter hashtag …

Institutional Death: Effects Of Carceral State And Education Institution On Black Men, Shontoria D. Pratt

African American Studies - All Scholarship

African American men have been dying at an alarming rate for many years. Issues such as violence, prison, education success rates, and health related issues, as well as institutional injustice, have been significant factors in these physical and mental deaths of African American men. The purpose of this research is to investigate the correlation, if any, between the quality of life of African American men in urban cities and their level of Afrocentric knowledge. To what extent does the exposure of Afrocentric knowledge affect the views or help African American men avoid these deaths? This research will present preliminary ideas …

Criminalizing The Other: Exploring The Impact Of The Netherlands' Adaptation Of Prosecutorial Guidelines On Sentencing Disparities, Alia Nahra

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research explores the impact of the 2015 institution of prosecution guidelines in the Netherlands. Prior to this switch, the Openbaar Ministerie operated using a punishment point system, which provided a mathematical formula with which to decide sanctions. Though the motivation of this change was to make the overall system more efficient and enable individual prosecutors to consider each case in a customizable and more equitable form, this research demonstrates that the change has served instead as a perpetuator (and in some cases, facilitator) of the persistent ethnic and gender biases already at work in the Netherlands. The social and …

A Socio-Demographic Analysis Of Responses To Terrorism, Gabriel Rubin, Christopher Salvatore

Gabriel Rubin

Extensive research has found that there are differences in reported levels of fear of crime and associated protective actions influenced by socio-demographic characteristics such as race and gender. Further studies, the majority of which focused on violent and property crime, have found that specific demographic characteristics influence fear of crime and protective behaviors. However, little research has focused on the influence of socio-demographic characteristics on perceptions, and protective actions in response to the threat of terrorism. Using data from the General Social Survey, this study compared individual-level protective actions and perceptions of the effectiveness of protective responses to the 9/11 …

How Two Sunken Ships Caused A War: The Legal And Cultural Battle Between Great Britain, Canada, And The Inuit Over The Franklin Expedition Shipwrecks, Christina Labarge

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Serial, Season Three: From Feeling To Structure, Jason Loviglio

RadioDoc Review

From the start, host and reporter Sarah Koenig presents the 2018 season of Serial as a corrective to the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand approach typical of earlier seasons and much of the work of This American Life, from which Serial spun off. In a thematic departure, Koenig sets out to tell the story of structures, rather than merely structure a story. The first character is a “cluster of concrete towers” in downtown Cleveland, called the Justice Center, a name we’ll quickly come to understand as ironic, if not Orwellian. Host Sarah Koenig describes the structure as “hideous but practical”. Koenig and company …

The Justice System Is Criminal, Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …