Law and Race Commons^™

The Legacy Of Civil Rights And The Opportunity For Transactional Law Clinics, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

At the end of the historic march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously paraphrased abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker stating, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The implication of the phrase is that the social justice goals of the Civil Rights Movement would eventually be achieved. His prayer was that servants of justice would be rewarded in due time. In other words, that the goals of the Civil Rights Movement would be achievable at some point in the future. President Obama resurrected the phrase throughout …

Centering Women In Prisoners' Rights Litigation, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

This Article consciously employs both a dignity rights-based framing and methodology. Dignity rights are those rights that are based on the Kantian assertion of “inalienable human worth." This framework for defining rights spans across a number of disciplines, including medicine and human rights law.30 Disciplinary sanctions like solitary confinement or forced medication might be described as anathema to human dignity because of their degrading effect on an individual’s emotional and social well-being.

This Article relies on first-person oral histories where possible. Bioethics scholar Claire Hooker argues that including narratives in work on dignity rights “is both a moral and an …

Twenty Years Of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

This Article revisits the history of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through a prism that highlights its historical articulation in light of the emergence of postracialism. The Article will explore two central inquiries. This first query attends to the specific contours of law as the site out of which CRT emerged. The Article hypothesizes that legal discourse presented a particularly legible template from which to demystify the role of reason and the rule of law in upholding the racial order. The second objective is to explore the contemporary significance of CRT's trajectory in light of today's "post-racial" milieu. The Article posits …

Longing For Loving, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Our task in this Symposium is to place Loving v. Virginia in a contemporary context: to interpret, if not reinterpret, its meaning in light of the settings in which race, sexuality, and intimacy are being negotiated and renegotiated today. So we might ask, in what way are Mildred and Richard Loving role models for us today? How, if at all, does the legal movement for marriage equality for interracial couples help us think through our arguments and strategies as we struggle today for marriage equality for same-sex couples?

One way to frame these questions is to ask whether there is …

The Uses Of History In Struggles For Racial Justice: Colonizing The Past And Managing Memory, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this Commentary, Professor Katherine Franke offers an analysis on Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic's California's Racial History and Constitutional Rationales for Race-Conscious Decision Making in Higher Education and Rebecca Tsosie's Sacred Obligations: Intercultural Justice and the Discourse of Treaty Rights. These two Articles, she observes, deploy history for the purposes of justifying certain contemporary normative claims on behalf of peoples of color: affirmative action in higher education for Delgado and Stefancic, and sovereignty rights for native peoples in Tsosie's case. Franke explores the manner in which stories of past conquest and discrimination contribute to contemporary conceptions of racial …

Rouge Et Noir Reread: A Popular Constitutional History Of The Angelo Herndon Case, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1932, Eugene Angelo Braxton Hemdon, a young Afro-American member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was arrested in Atlanta and charged with an attempt to incite insurrection against that state's lawful authority. Some five years later, in Herndon v. Lowry, Herndon filed a writ of habeas corpus asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the Georgia statute under which he had been convicted. Two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, the Court, voting 5-4, declared the use of the Georgia political-crimes statute against him unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived Herndon of his rights to freedom …