Law and Race Commons^™

The Aftermath Of Dobbs: How The Criminalization Of Abortion Has Obstructed The Exercise Of Bodily Autonomy, Sonia Bakshi

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

This Blog addresses the topic of bodily autonomy in relation to the criminalization of abortion because everyone should be entitled to the right to make their own choices, especially when it comes to their bodies, and even greater, their selves as a whole. With the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, the ability to exercise bodily autonomy has never been more obstructed. The Supreme Court has left the nation with the impression that they do not believe women are capable of making decisions about their own bodies or their own futures. Now, it’s important to look into what the ripple …

Serving A Country That Will Not Accommodate Our Religion: The Sikh American Struggle To Choose Between Career Or Faith, Tanveer Moundi

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world, with approximately thirty million followers of the faith worldwide. It is a monotheistic faith that teaches honesty, compassion, humility, universal equity, and respect for all religions. Since the 1984 genocide of Sikhs in India, many followers of the faith have immigrated to Western countries in hopes of “the American dream” and the prospect of freely practicing their faith. But as a devastating response to the tragedy of 9/11, members of the Sikh community living in the United States have become victims of hate crimes, workplace discrimination, school bullying, and …

A Seat At The Table: Why You Deserve It, But Your Brain Might Be Telling You Otherwise, Jonathan Ibarra Paz

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

“Are you frequently worried about making mistakes and frustrated because your work is not perfect? Do you suspect you will never be smart enough or good enough no matter how successful you already are? Do you often attribute your success to luck, chance, or anything else except your own talent and hard work?” If you answered yes to any of these questions, it could indicate that you suffer from imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome can be described as, an internal experience of intellectual phoniness… result[ing] in people feeling like they lack the skills, knowledge, and/or competence to do their jobs despite …

Social Equity: Will The Cannabis Industry Choose To Overcome Its Lack Of Diversity?, Dana Oviedo

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

In the world of legal cannabis, a new phrase has taken over: Social Equity. What does this really mean? Social Equity in the cannabis industry is an attempt to level the playing field for individuals who were negatively impacted by the prohibition of cannabis.

Long before the re-legalization of cannabis began to spread across the United States, Black and Brown folks were and continue to be disproportionately arrested and locked up for cannabis related offenses. Those most impacted by the War on Drugs have historically been Black and Brown individuals from low-income communities. Militarized policing targeted to these low-income communities …

Constitution-Free Zones: How The Fourth Amendment Rights Of Americans Are Violated At And Near The Border, Camila Valdivieso

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. U.S. Const. amend. XIV. Border Patrol continues to abuse their authority to this day.

Pray The Gay Away: Conversion Therapy, Suicide, Religion, And The First Amendment, Eric Cody Bass

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

In the United States, gay conversion therapy (GCT) has not been banned nationally, although twenty states have issued laws banning therapists from practicing it. While the Supreme Court has refused to hear several cases involving challenges to laws banning GCT, recently the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found a local law banning the practice as an unconstitutional regulation on the First Amendment right of speech. This ruling disappointingly confuses ideas of First Amendment protections with what amounts to psychological torture of our youth. It must be noted that while bans on GCT have been successfully upheld as constitutional in other …

More Than A Hashtag: Why We Need To #Protectblackwomen In Real Life, Golden Gate University School Of Law

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

This piece will address the ways in which Black women continue to be disrespected, unprotected, and neglected, both publicly—as a result of systemic racism and police brutality—as well as privately—as a result of the legal system’s failure to appropriately address domestic violence committed against them.

Why We Should Provide More Support For Women Of Color In Academia, Silvia Chairez-Perez

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

My experience as a woman of color in higher education is not unique. In this piece, I will share my own story and discuss challenges women of color face to succeed in academia and how their absence in these spaces negatively affects the success of female students of color. Additionally, I will describe methods institutions of higher learning can implement to hire more women of color and how having women of color teachers has impacted my educational journey.

What “Good” Has Come From The “Good Faith” Exception?, Yasamin Elahi-Shirazi

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

The FourthAmendment protects the right of the people—us—against unreasonable searches, seizures, and warrantless conduct by government actors—police officers. The Supreme Court has added safeguards to this amendment, with the seminal cases of U.S. v. Weeks and Mapp v. Ohio. The Court created the exclusionary rule, which excludes evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment from criminal trials. Initially designed as a multifaceted legal mechanism to uphold judicial integrity, deter police misconduct, and serve as a remedy for those who are victims of constitutional violations. The deterrent value was meant to help protect the public at large—especially …

Founding Managing Editor’S Welcome Message, Tiffany Avila

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

It is with great privilege and honor to introduce you to the GGU Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Law Journal. This project started when my colleague, dearest friend and founding Editor-in-Chief, Silvia Chairez-Perez, approached me during our internship with the California Supreme Court Capital Central Staff. We were discussing how far we have come with the resources presented to us, and our motivation to provide a better pathway to underrepresented law students.

Founding Editor-In-Chief’S Welcome Message, Silvia Chairez-Perez

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

Welcome! Thank you for visiting Golden Gate University’s Journal of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice website. The Journal strives to provide race, gender, sexuality, and social justice practitioners, students, judges, and academics a platform to share their thought leadership via a born-digital format. We endeavor to publish legal scholarship of the highest quality.

Founding Journal Advisor’S Welcome Message, Jyoti Nanda

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

IMPORT OF THE RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, & SOCIAL JUSTICE LAW JOURNAL IN 2021

The launch of the Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal is no small feat and I applaud our student leaders for their fortitude in the middle of a year unlike any other. In 2020, our country underwent a national reckoning on race trigged by the unlawful death by police of several unarmed African American women and men while grappling with a global pandemic that halted life as we knew it. Our GGU law students, like all students everywhere, persevered – shifting to remote learning and …

Interim Law Dean’S Welcome Message, Eric C. Christiansen

Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice Law Journal

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Golden Gate University Race, Gender, Sexuality, & Social Justice Law Journal. There has never been a more appropriate or important time to inaugurate a journal dedicated to the law’s capacity to advance social justice than right now. And there is no better institution to inaugurate this new journal than Golden Gate University School of Law. Thank you to all our readers—now and in the years to come—who will help us move the values, principles, and ideas in this journal into communities and courtrooms in pursuit of equality and true justice.

Rwu Law Equity Scorecard February 2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Creating And Undoing Legacies Of Resilience: Black Women As Martyrs In The Black Community Under Oppressive Social Control, Leah Iman Aniefuna, M. Amari Aniefuna, Jason M. Williams

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper contextualizes the struggles and contributions of Black motherhood and reproductive justice under police surveillance in Baltimore, Maryland. We conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers regarding their experiences and perceptions of policing in their community during the aftermath of the police-involved death of Freddie Gray. While the literature disproportionately focuses on Black males, little knowledge is known about the struggles and contributions of Black mothers in matters concerning police brutality and the fight against institutional violence. There still remains the question regarding the role of and impact on Black mothers during matters of institutional violence against Black children. We fill …

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 …

Very Long Engagements: The Persistent Authority Of Bridewealth In A Post-Apartheid South African Community, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines the persistent authority of the customary practice for forming recognized marriages in many South African communities, centered on bridewealth and called “lobola.” Marriage rates have sharply fallen in South Africa, and many South Africans blame this on the difficulty of completing lobola amid intense economic strife. Using in-depth qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu-Natal, where lobola demands are the country’s highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola’s authority survives because lay actors, and especially women, have innovated new repertoires of lobola behavior that allow them to pursue emerging needs and desires for marriage …

Not For Free: Exploring The Collateral Costs Of Diversity In Legal Education, Spearit

Articles

This essay examines some of the institutional costs of achieving a more diverse law student body. In recent decades, there has been growing support for diversity initiatives in education, and the legal academy is no exception. Yet for most law schools, diversity remains an elusive goal, some of which is the result of problems with anticipating the needs of diverse students and being able to deliver. These are some of the unseen or hidden costs associated with achieving greater diversity. Both law schools and the legal profession remain relatively stratified by race, which is an ongoing legacy of legal education’s …

Beyond The 'Resiliency' And 'Grit' Narrative In Legal Education: Race, Class And Gender Considerations, Christian Sundquist

Articles

Law schools have been struggling to adapt to the “new normal” of decreased enrollments and a significantly altered legal employment market. Despite the decrease in traditional attorney jobs, as well as the possibility that artificial intelligence systems such as “ROSS” will displace additional jobs in the future, there still remains a significant gap in legal services available to the poor, middle class, and immigrants. The integration of social justice methodologies in the classroom thus has become critically important to the future of legal education and of the very practice of law.

Many commentators on the future of legal education have …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Intersectionality And Title Vii: A Brief (Pre-)History, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

Title VII was twenty-five years old when Kimberlé Crenshaw published her path-breaking article introducing “intersectionality” to critical legal scholarship. By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reached its thirtieth birthday, the intersectionality critique had come of age, generating a sophisticated subfield and producing many articles that remain classics in the field of anti-discrimination law and beyond. Employment discrimination law was not the only target of intersectionality critics, but Title VII’s failure to capture and ameliorate the particular experiences of women of color loomed large in this early legal literature. Courts proved especially reluctant to recognize multi-dimensional discrimination against …

Evolving Standards Of Domination: Abandoning A Flawed Legal Standard And Approaching A New Era In Penal Reform, Spearit

Articles

This Article critiques the evolving standards of decency doctrine as a form of Social Darwinism. It argues that evolving standards of decency provided a system of review that was tailor-made for Civil Rights opponents to scale back racial progress. Although as a doctrinal matter, evolving standards sought to tie punishment practices to social mores, prison sentencing became subject to political agendas that determined the course of punishment more than the benevolence of a maturing society. Indeed, rather than the fierce competition that is supposed to guide social development, the criminal justice system was consciously deployed as a means of social …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

The Highly Political Supreme Court, Riley Lane Munks

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper investigates whether Republicans or Democrats support a strong Supreme Court and why. Furthermore, by analyzing data from the 2012 American National Election Survey, I will study support of the court based on gender, age, and race. Since the early 1980’s the court has taken a strong conservative direction, to the dismay of many liberals. Republicans feel comfortable sending a congressional dispute to the courts while Democrats may feel disenfranchised with the judicial process. I also believe that younger people believe the court is an outdated method of making laws and interpreting the constitution. Originally the Supreme Court was …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Thirteenth Amendment Scholars In Support Of Plaintiff-Appellee And Affirmance, William M. Carter Jr., Dawinder S. Sidhu, Alexander Tsesis, Rebecca E. Zietlow

Amici Briefs

In the case of United States v. Hatch, the defendant in a hate crimes prosecution brought the first major challenge to the constitutionality of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. This amicus brief argues that the Act is constitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment.

From Domain Names To Video Games: The Rise Of The Internet In Presidential Politics, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Senator Barack Obama's historic victory in the 2008 election marks some important milestones - notably that this country is ready for its first African-American president. His win also underscores the importance of understanding today's Internet as a campaign tool. No longer is the Internet a one-way communications medium between candidate and electorate. It is now a powerful multi-directional networking tool. It can bridge physical and virtual spaces in a way never before possible, bringing previously latent social and political groups together. Senator Obama's campaign strategists understood and capitalized on the capabilities of what has recently become known as Web 2.0 …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Infected Judgment: Legal Responses To Physician Bias, Mary Crossley

Articles

Substantial evidence indicates that clinically irrelevant patient characteristics, including race and gender, may at times influence a physician's choice of treatment. Less clear, however, is whether a patient who is the victim of a biased medical decision has any effective legal recourse. Heedful of the difficulties of designing research to establish conclusively the role of physician bias, this article surveys published evidence suggesting the operation of physician bias in clinical decision making. The article then examines potential legal responses to biased medical judgments. A patient who is the subject of a biased decision may sue her doctor for violating his …

Poverty, Welfare Reform, And The Meaning Of Disability, Jennifer Pokempner, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Gay Rights For Gay Whites: Race, Sexual Identity, And Equal Protection Discourse, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

My argument proceeds in four parts. Part I situates my discussion of the synergistic relationship among race, class, gender, and sexuality within a broader body of research on the "intersectionality'' of systems of oppression and of identity categories. Part I then examines how my scholarship attempts to advance this literature both substantively and conceptually. Part II expounds my claim that the comparative and essentialist treatment of race and sexuality within pro-gay and lesbian theory and politics marginalizes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans­gendered persons of color and constructs and reinforces the notion that the gay and lesbian community is uniformly white …