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Articles 1 - 19 of 19
Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Financial Inclusion, Cryptocurrency, And Afrofuturism, Lynnise E. Pantin
Financial Inclusion, Cryptocurrency, And Afrofuturism, Lynnise E. Pantin
Faculty Scholarship
As a community, Black people consistently face barriers to full participation in traditional financial markets. The decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency market is attractive to a community that has been historically and systematically excluded from the traditional financial markets by both private and public actors. As new entrants to any type of financial market, Black people have increasingly embraced blockchain technology and cryptocurrency as a path towards the wealth-building opportunities and financial freedom they have been denied in traditional markets. This Article analyzes whether the technology’s decentralized system will lead to financial inclusion or increased financial exclusion. Without reconciling the …
Race And Equity In The Age Of Unicorns, Lynnise E. Pantin
Race And Equity In The Age Of Unicorns, Lynnise E. Pantin
Faculty Scholarship
This Article critically examines startup culture and its legal predicates. The Article analyzes innovation culture as a whole and uses the downfall of Theranos to illustrate the deficiencies in Silicon Valley culture, centering on race and class. The Article demonstrates that the rise and fall of the unicorn startup Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is emblematic of the problem with the glorification and pursuit of the unicorn designation for startup ventures. The examination of the downfall of Theranos exposes how investors, founders, and others in Silicon Valley engage with each other in the context of pursuing unicorn status. The …
Expansion Of New Law In Southeast May Stave Off Black Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell, Sarah Stein, Ann Carpenter
Expansion Of New Law In Southeast May Stave Off Black Land Loss, Thomas W. Mitchell, Sarah Stein, Ann Carpenter
Faculty Scholarship
Landownership and homeownership are significant contributors to the creation of wealth and thus, drivers of intergenerational economic mobility. However, many people who have inherited family land are unable to realize these opportunities because of the legal effect of their particular form of landownership, often called heirs' property. These landowners are more likely to lose their land through what is known as a partition sale—a property sale resulting from a dispute between co-owners, often ignited by an outside party with an investment interest in the land. This Partners Update article explores the repercussions of heirs' property ownership and examines legislative solutions …
Race And Bankruptcy: Explaining Racial Disparities In Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison, Belisa Pang, Antoine Uettwiller
Race And Bankruptcy: Explaining Racial Disparities In Consumer Bankruptcy, Edward R. Morrison, Belisa Pang, Antoine Uettwiller
Faculty Scholarship
African American bankruptcy filers select Chapter 13 far more often than other debtors, who opt instead for Chapter 7, which has higher success rates and lower attorneys’ fees. Prior scholarship blames racial discrimination by attorneys. We propose an alternative explanation: Chapter 13 offers benefits, including retention of cars and driver’s licenses, that are more valuable to African American debtors because of relatively long commutes. We study a 2011 policy change in Chicago, which seized cars and suspended licenses of consumers with large traffic-related debts. The policy produced a large increase in Chapter 13 filings, especially by African Americans. Two mechanisms …
Inclusion, Exclusion, And The "New" Economic Inequality, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Inclusion, Exclusion, And The "New" Economic Inequality, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
Is racial inequality an unwelcome intruder to the new discourse on economic inequality? The present discourse on economic inequality emphasizes decades-long trends that have increased economic inequality, whether as a result of reoccurring features in the structure of capitalist economies or more recent changes in institutional, structural, and economic conditions. Researchers direct us to the rising fortunes of the top earners and asset holders relative to the rest, the declining fortunes of the middle class harmed by stagnating wages, and the declining share of industries (like manufacturing) in the economy. This new economic inequality discourse has preoccupied economists, garnered its …
Reparations For Slavery And Jim Crow, Its Assumptions And Implications, David B. Lyons
Reparations For Slavery And Jim Crow, Its Assumptions And Implications, David B. Lyons
Faculty Scholarship
This paper develops the case for reparations to African Americans today, based on wrongdoing that began with slavery, that was not repaired by Reconstruction, that was continued in new forms under Jim Crow, and that left a deeply-entrenched legacy of disadvantage despite civil rights reforms of the twentieth century. It reviews relevant aspects of U.S. history and policies since 1607 and lays out the moral considerations that call for a system of reparations far beyond anything yet contemplated by American society. It argues that cash payments, while needed, would not suffice, because slavery and Jim Crow were not just a …
Growing Inequality And Racial Economic Gaps, Thomas W. Mitchell
Growing Inequality And Racial Economic Gaps, Thomas W. Mitchell
Faculty Scholarship
Over the past several decades, economic inequality has grown dramatically in the United States while inter-generational economic mobility has declined, which has challenged the very notion of the "American Dream." In fact, the United States is more economically unequal than most other industrialized countries. Further, there are dramatic and growing racial economic gaps in this country. Despite the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the various spinoffs it has catalyzed, there has not been any sustained, widespread social movement to address economic inequality in the United States over the course of the past several decades. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a …
Families Of Color In Crisis: Bearing The Weight Of The Financial Market Meltdown, André Douglas Pond Cummings
Families Of Color In Crisis: Bearing The Weight Of The Financial Market Meltdown, André Douglas Pond Cummings
Faculty Scholarship
The financial market crisis of 2008 landed heaviest and hardest upon communities of color. In the minority communities that continue to bear the crushing weight of this crisis—which continues unrequited—women of color, and by extension, their families, are by far the group most devastated by the global market meltdown. In an ultimate irony, most economists, scholars, and commentators now agree that the collapse, which continues to ravage Main Street, was caused primarily by a select group of privileged white men–i.e., Wall Street executives, bankers, and the politicians purchased by Wall Street largess. The impact of Wall Street’s fascination with securitizing …
Achieving Reproductive Justice In The International Surrogacy Market, Seema Mohapatra
Achieving Reproductive Justice In The International Surrogacy Market, Seema Mohapatra
Faculty Scholarship
Men and women are increasingly seeking surrogacy arrangements outside of their home country, mainly due to legal restrictions or the high cost of surrogacy in their home countries. Global surrogacy raises numerous issues including the economic status of women involved in surrogacy arrangements, poverty, issues related to what motherhood means and how women from different ethnic, socioeconomic, class, and national backgrounds interact in the global surrogacy market. This essay analyzes whether reproductive justice exists in the current international surrogacy market. Reproductive justice refers to the normative concept that all women, regardless of their ethnic, racial, national, social, or economic backgrounds, …
Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander
Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander
Faculty Scholarship
U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based …
Post Racialism?, André Douglas Pond Cummings
Post Racialism?, André Douglas Pond Cummings
Faculty Scholarship
The 2008 election of President Barack Obama represents a halcyon moment in U.S. history. President Obama’s election begs a critical question: whether his nationwide landslide victory catapulted the United States, with its sordid racial past, into a truly post-racial place as many claim. While Obama’s election was possible due to important changes that have taken place in the United States in the past fifty years, the reality is that profound disparities continue to exist between minority and white Americans that show no sign of dissipating during this Obama presidency. Of these profound disparities, some of the most striking include those …
Stimulus And Civil Rights, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Stimulus And Civil Rights, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
Federal spending has the capacity to perpetuate racial inequality, not simply through explicit exclusion, but through choices made in the legislative and institutional design of spending programs. Drawing on the lessons of New Deal and postwar social programs, this Essay offers an account of the specificfeatures offederal spending that give it salience in structuring racial arrangements. Federal spending programs, this Essay argues, are relevant in structuring racial inequality due to their massive scale, their creation of new programmatic and spending infrastructures, and the choices made in these programs as to whether to impose explicit inclusionary norms on states and localities. …
Incarceration And The Economic Fortunes Of Urban Neighborhoods, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West
Incarceration And The Economic Fortunes Of Urban Neighborhoods, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West
Faculty Scholarship
New research has identified the consequences of high rates of incarceration on neighborhood crime rates, but few studies have looked beyond crime to examine the collateral effects of incarceration on the social and economic well being of the neighborhoods themselves and their residents. We assess two specific indicia of neighborhood economic well-being, household income and human capital, dimensions that are robust predictors of elevated crime, enforcement and incarceration rates. We decompose incarceration effects by neighborhood racial composition and socio-economic conditions to account for structural disadvantages in labor force and access to wealth that flow from persistent patterns of residential segregation. …
Racial Coding And The Financial Market Crisis, André Douglas Pond Cummings
Racial Coding And The Financial Market Crisis, André Douglas Pond Cummings
Faculty Scholarship
The financial market crisis of 2008 continues to plague the United States and countries around the world. The underlying causes of the 2008 collapse are numerous, intricate and complex. Academic scholars, investigative reporters and leading economists are now deconstructing the multiplicity of failures that enabled the breathtaking meltdown that nearly collapsed the global economy. As this thoughtful deconstruction emerges, a disturbing trend has forcefully surfaced, wherein dozens of writers, scholars and thinkers, motivated by politics, limelight and self indulgence, attempt to fix a singular or foundational cause as “the” reason for the market crisis of 2008. In a current political …
Forced Sale Risk: Class, Race, And The "Double Discount", Thomas W. Mitchell, Stephen Malpezzi, Richard K. Green
Forced Sale Risk: Class, Race, And The "Double Discount", Thomas W. Mitchell, Stephen Malpezzi, Richard K. Green
Faculty Scholarship
What impact does a forced sale have upon a property owner's wealth? And do certain characteristics of a property owner such as whether they are rich or poor or whether they are black or white, tend to affect the price yielded at a forced sale? This Article addresses arguments made by some courts and legal scholars who have claimed that certain types of forced sales result in wealth maximizing, economic efficiencies. The Article addresses such economic arguments by returning to first principles and reviewing the distinction between sales conducted under fair market value conditions and sales conducted under forced sale …
Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell
Destabilizing The Normalization Of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role For Legal Empiricism, Thomas W. Mitchell
Faculty Scholarship
Mitchell's study exemplifies the New Legal Realist goal of combining qualitative and quantitative empirical research to shed light on important legal and policy issues. He also demonstrates the utility of a ground-level contextual analysis that examines legal problems from the bottom up. The study tracks processes by which black rural landowners have gradually been dispossessed of more than 90% of the land held by their predecessors in 1910. Mitchell points out that despite the continuing practices that contribute to this problem, there has been very little research on the issue, and what little attention legal scholars have paid to it …
Gendered Shades Of Property: A Status Check On Gender, Race & Property, Laura M. Padilla
Gendered Shades Of Property: A Status Check On Gender, Race & Property, Laura M. Padilla
Faculty Scholarship
This article explores the relationship between gender, race and property.Women in the United States continue to be economically disadvantaged, and women of color are even more disadvantaged. This article will open with a review of laws, past and present, which have shaped women's rights to own, manage and transfer property. It will then provide a status check of where women, including women of color, stand in the United States relative to the rest of the population vis-a-vis income and other indicators of economic well-being. The article will then discuss why economic inequality persists, trotting out the usual reasons of discrimination …
Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism, Michael A. Heller, Christopher Serkin
Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism, Michael A. Heller, Christopher Serkin
Faculty Scholarship
Whatever happened to the study of restitution? Once a core private law subject along with property, torts, and contracts, restitution has receded from American legal scholarship. Few law professors teach the material, fewer still write in the area, and no one even agrees what the field comprises anymore. Hanoch threatens to reverse the tide and make restitution interesting again. The book takes commonplace words such as "value" and "gain" and shows how they embody a society's underlying normative principles. Variations across cultures in the law of unjust enrichment reflect differences in national understandings of sharing, property, and even personhood. As …
Single-Parent Latinas On The Margin: Seeking A Room With A View, Meals, And Built-In Community, Laura M. Padilla
Single-Parent Latinas On The Margin: Seeking A Room With A View, Meals, And Built-In Community, Laura M. Padilla
Faculty Scholarship
This article considers the unique challenges of single parent Latinas and and a different way of viewing concerns of single parents. This alternative paradigm uses a holistic approach to the problems I had been pondering, acknowledging their interconnectedness, rather than artificially segmenting them into disjointed issues. I visualized a multi-pronged approach to Latina mothers' many concerns, based on a cohousing model, as modified for the needs of a low-income, racially distinct population of single-parent Latinas. It describes co-housing and proposes that this housing model be more broadly accessible through land use changes and greater acceptance of housing beyond single family …