Law and Race Commons^™

Inside Out, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

Russell Robinson has done it again. With Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, he has given us another provocative Article, which illuminates a phenomenon in the world and, indirectly, in ourselves. The Article represents much of what generally makes Robinson’s work so compelling. First, he writes about tremendously complex subjects and attends to their many complexities in remarkably lucid prose. Second, despite his critical perspective, he does not hesitate to make prescriptive arguments.

In this Article, he even ventures into the hallowed ground of constitutional argument, something he has not done since his first article on race-based …

Discrimination By Comparison, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary discrimination law is in crisis, both methodologically and conceptually. The crisis arises in large part from the judiciary's dependence on comparators – those who are like a discrimination claimant but for the protected characteristic – as a favored heuristic for observing discrimination. The profound mismatch of the comparator methodology with current understandings of identity discrimination and the realities of the modern workplace has nearly depleted discrimination jurisprudence and theory. Even in run-of-the-mill cases, comparators often cannot be found, particularly in today's mobile, knowledge-based economy. This difficulty is amplified for complex claims, which rest on thicker understandings of discrimination developed …

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 …

Women In The Aids Epidemic: A Portrait Of Unmet Needs, Arlene Zarembka, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

While rarely a month goes by that the topic of AIDS escapes discussion in the legal literature, a survey of legal publications reveals that the implications of AIDS for women has received scant treatment by legal commentators. Unfortunately, this neglect is not unique to the legal community, but reflects a larger societal disinterest in women with AIDS.

In fact, this epidemic looks quite different from the perspective of women. The medical, social, and legal needs of women affected by AIDS are in many ways needs that preexisted AIDS, but which have been magnified by the threat and implications of HIV …