Law and Race Commons^™

Program: Ax Handle Saturday 40th Anniversary, August 26, 2000

Textual material from the Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Papers

A program for the 40th anniversary of "Ax Handle" Saturday. August 26, 2000 at Hemming Plaza, Historic Snyder Memorial.

Saying No To Stakeholding, Jeffrey S. Lehman, Deborah C. Malamud

Michigan Law Review

What if America were to make good on its promise of equal opportunity by [XXX]? That's the bold proposal set forth by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott.... The quotation above is from the Yale University Press announcement describing Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott's new book, with one change: we have substituted "[XXX]" for the authors' catchphrase summary of their proposal. What do you think the missing words might be? How would you enable America "to make good on its promise of equal opportunity"? As you ponder that question, you might consider the following feature of the Ackerman/ …

The Paradox Of Silence: Some Questions About Silence As Resistance, Dorothy E. Roberts

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In Part I, I note the difficulty in distinguishing between silencing and silence as resistance. This difficulty has often led people in power to misinterpret the silence of people of color. Part II further explores the complications of incorporating the study of silence into resistance scholarship. I illustrate this complexity by discussing the silencing of welfare mothers and the use of language by women of color to challenge dominant medical discourse. Part III considers Professor Montoya's proposal to use silence as a pedagogical tool. Continuing my examination of silence as both liberating and accommodating, I distinguish between silence in the …

Expanding Directions, Exploding Parameters: Culture And Nation In Latcrit Coalitional Imagination, Elizabeth M. Iglesias, Francisco Valdes

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The articles and commentaries in this Symposium are excellent points of departure for reflecting upon the advances thus far achieved in the evolution of this still very young community of scholars. The articles and commentaries that follow this brief Introduction comprise the second "free-standing" law review Symposium on LatCrit theory organized specifically in response to student interests and initiatives. The timing is fitting, for this Symposium also coincides with the fifth anniversary of LatCrit theory's emergence in the American legal academy. Since then, five annual conferences and four additional colloquia have produced, in total, nine published symposia in both mainstream …

Culture, Nationhood, And The Human Rights Ideal, Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol, Sharon Elizabeth Rush

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Symposium on nation and culture illustrates these LatCrit goals and advances them. The two main works and the commentaries on them are rich explorations and representations of the voices and concerns of LatCrit theory. This Foreword engages all the works by focusing on the concept of voice and silence. Part I locates the works in the axis of silence and power. Part II explores how critical theory and international human rights norms can be used to develop a progressive methodology to analyze and detect the exclusion or silencing of myriad voices. This Part develops a LatCritical Human Rights paradigm …

Interview With Alan M. Lerner, Lake Srinivasan, Alan M. Lerner, Legal Oral History Project, University Of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Legal Oral History Project

For transcript, click the Download button above. For video index, click the link below.

Alan M. Lerner (L '65) was a practice professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1993 until his death in 2010. He practiced and taught mainly in the areas of civil rights and family law.

Orientalism Revisited In Asylum And Refugee Claims, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the stereotyping of Islam both by advocates and academics in refugee rights advocacy. The article looks at a particular aspect of this stereotyping, which can be seen as ‘neo-Orientalism’ occurring in the asylum and refugee context, particularly affecting women, and the damage that it does to refugee rights both in and outside the Arab and Muslim world. The article points out the dangers of neo-orientalism in framing refugee law issues, and asks for a more thoughtful and analytical approach by Western refugee advocates and academics on the panoply of Muslim attitudes and Islamic thought affecting applicants for …

Prosecuting Violence/Reconstructing Community, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

For two centuries, the private violence of American history has paraded into courts for public trial. Often dramatized by the spectacle of rape and murder, the public trials of private violence increasingly are seen to decide the fates of both the accused and the victim of crime. The fate of community, whether the community of the victim, the accused, or the public, seems at first blush untouched by such trials. Like victims and their families, however, communities struck by violence suffer profound loss. That loss is expressed in the destruction of public discourse, reason, and citizenship. This public ruin is …

Constructing Solidarity: Interest And White Workers, Martha R. Mahoney

Articles

No abstract provided.

Race In The Courtroom: Perceptions Of Guilt And Dispositional Attributions, Samuel R. Sommers, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

The present studies compare the judgments of White and Black mock jurors in interracial trials. In Study 1, the defendant’s race did not influence White college students’ decisions but Black students demonstrated ingroup/outgroup bias in their guilt ratings and attributions for the defendant’s behavior. The aversive nature of modern racism suggests that Whites are motivated to appear nonprejudiced when racial issues are salient; therefore, the race salience of a trial summary was manipulated and given to noncollege students in Study 2. Once again, the defendant’s race did not influence Whites when racial issues were salient. But in the non-race-salient version …

Whiteness And Remedy: Under-Ruling Civil Rights In Walker V. City Of Mesquite, Martha R. Mahoney

Articles

No abstract provided.

Redressing The Imbalances: Rethinking The Judicial Role After R. V. R.D.S., Richard Devlin Frsc, Dianne Pothier

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. R.D.S. dealt with whether a trial judge's comments, about the interactions between police officers and "non-white groups", gave rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias in the circumstances. They strongly criticize the contrary ruling of the dissent as inappropriately drawing a false dichotomy between decisions based on evidence and decisions based on evidence and decision based on generalizations, and as improperly ignoring social context with an unwarranted confidence in the ideology of colour blindness. While more supportive of the majority's analysis, the authors also find cause for concern, with …

Women Defenders On Television: Representing Suspects And The Racial Politics Of Retribution, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

This Essay is about Ellenor Frutt, Annie Dornell, Joyce Davenport, and other women criminal defense attorneys of prime time television. It examines how high-stakes network television presents sympathetic stories about women working as criminal defense attorneys while simultaneously supporting the popular thirst for the harshest criminal penalties. Real women who choose to represent criminal defendants are fundamentally out of step with angry and unforgiving attitudes toward crime and criminals. Indeed, women defenders have chosen work that puts them in direct opposition to the widespread public willingness to incarcerate record numbers of Americans, often young African-American and Latino men, for longer …

Recognizing Opportunistic Bias Crimes, Lu-In Wang

Articles

The federal approach to punishing bias-motivated crimes is more limited than the state approach. Though the federal and state methods overlap in some respects, two features of the federal approach restrict its range of application. First, federal law prohibits a narrower range of conduct than do most state bias crimes laws. In order to be punishable under federal law, bias-motivated conduct must either constitute a federal crime or interfere with a federally protected right or activity-requirements that exclude racially motivated assault, property damage and many other common violent or destructive bias offenses. In most states, however, hate crimes encompass a …

Every Man Has A Right To Decide His Own Destiny: The Development Of Native Hawaiian Self-Determination As Compared To Self-Determination Of Native Alaskans And The People Of Puerto Rico, 33 J. Marshall L. Rev. 639 (2000), Michael Carroll

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Bad For Business": Contextual Analysis, Race Discrimination, And Fast Food, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 207 (2000), Regina Austin

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Silencing Speech In The Workplace: Re-Examining The Use Of Specific Speech Injunctive Relief For Title Vii Hostile Environment Work Claims, 34 J. Marshall L. Rev. 321 (2000), Sonali Das

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dealing With Histories Of Oppression: Black And Jewish Reactions To Passivity And Collaboration In William Styron's Confessions Of Nat Turner And Hannah Arendt's Eichmann In Jerusalem, David Abraham, Kimberly A. Mccoy

Articles

No abstract provided.

Shifting Power For Battered Women: Law, Material Resources, And Poor Women Of Color, Donna Coker

Articles

No abstract provided.