Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
“She’S Earned This”: Angela Onwuachi-Willig Rejoices In Historic Confirmation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
“She’S Earned This”: Angela Onwuachi-Willig Rejoices In Historic Confirmation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Shorter Faculty Works
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University’s School of Law—the first Black woman to be dean of a top-20 law school—is rejoicing. The first Black woman has been confirmed to the US Supreme Court.
Onwuachi-Willig has had Ketanji Brown Jackson’s back from the moment President Biden announced he would nominate the federal judge to the nation’s highest court.
Law Dean’S Letter Urges Confirmation Of Biden’S Historic Scotus Pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Law Dean’S Letter Urges Confirmation Of Biden’S Historic Scotus Pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Shorter Faculty Works
In a letter citing Black women’s underrepresentation on the federal bench, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of the BU School of Law, and more than 200 other Black women law deans and professors urged the US Senate on Friday to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the nation’s highest court “swiftly and with bipartisan support.”
Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert Tsai
Equality Is A Brokered Idea, Robert Tsai
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
This essay examines the Supreme Court's stunning decision in the census case, Department of Commerce v. New York. I characterize Chief Justice John Roberts' decision to side with the liberals as an example of pursuing the ends of equality by other means – this time, through the rule of reason. Although the appeal was limited in scope, the stakes for political and racial equality were sky high. In blocking the administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, 5 members of the Court found the justification the administration gave to be a pretext. In this instance, that lie …
Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts
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 …
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
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 …
The Fight For Equal Protection: Reconstruction-Redemption Redux, Kermit Roosevelt Iii, Patricia Stottlemyer
The Fight For Equal Protection: Reconstruction-Redemption Redux, Kermit Roosevelt Iii, Patricia Stottlemyer
All Faculty Scholarship
With Justice Scalia gone, and Justices Ginsburg and Kennedy in their late seventies, there is the possibility of significant movement on the Supreme Court in the next several years. A two-justice shift could upend almost any area of constitutional law, but the possible movement in race-based equal protection jurisprudence provides a particularly revealing window into the larger trends at work. In the battle over equal protection, two strongly opposed visions of the Constitution contend against each other, and a change in the Court’s composition may determine the outcome of that struggle. In this essay, we set out the current state …
The Ironies Of Affirmative Action, Kermit Roosevelt Iii
The Ironies Of Affirmative Action, Kermit Roosevelt Iii
All Faculty Scholarship
The Supreme Court’s most recent confrontation with race-based affirmative action, Fisher v. University of Texas, did not live up to people’s expectations—or their fears. The Court did not explicitly change the current approach in any substantial way. It did, however, signal that it wants race-based affirmative action to be subject to real strict scrutiny, not the watered-down version featured in Grutter v. Bollinger. That is a significant signal, because under real strict scrutiny, almost all race-based affirmative action programs are likely unconstitutional. This is especially true given the conceptual framework the Court has created for such programs—the way …
Marital Supremacy And The Constitution Of The Nonmarital Family, Serena Mayeri
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 …