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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
On Time, (In)Equality, And Death, Fred O. Smith Jr.
On Time, (In)Equality, And Death, Fred O. Smith Jr.
Michigan Law Review
In recent years, American institutions have inadvertently encountered the bodies of former slaves with increasing frequency. Pledges of respect are common features of these discoveries, accompanied by cultural debates about what “respect” means. Often embedded in these debates is an intuition that there is something special about respecting the dead bodies, burial sites, and images of victims of mass, systemic horrors. This Article employs legal doctrine, philosophical insights, and American history to both interrogate and anchor this intuition.
Law can inform these debates because we regularly turn to legal settings to resolve disputes about the dead. Yet the passage of …
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
A Different Type Of Property: White Women And The Human Property They Kept, Michele Goodwin
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.
Race And Constitutional Law Casebooks: Recognizing The Proslavery Constitution, Juan F. Perea
Race And Constitutional Law Casebooks: Recognizing The Proslavery Constitution, Juan F. Perea
Michigan Law Review
Federalist No. 54 shows that part of Madison's public defense of the Constitution included the defense of some of its proslavery provisions. Madison and his reading public were well aware that aspects of the Constitution protected slavery. These aspects of the Constitution were publicly debated in the press and in state ratification conventions. Just as the Constitution's protections for slavery were debated at the time of its framing and ratification, the relationship between slavery and the Constitution remains a subject of debate. Historians continue to debate the centrality of slavery to the Constitution. The majority position among historians today appears …
An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman
An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman
Michigan Law Review
Austin Allen's monograph marks the 150th anniversary of the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford with a revisionist interpretation of that oft-examined case. Many scholars have portrayed the case as a proslavery decision that fanned sectional fires. After all, the Court held that blacks were not U.S. citizens and that Congress was impotent to bar slavery in U.S. territories. Allen, by contrast, understands the case primarily as a judicial attempt to rationalize federal commerce and slavery jurisprudences. Part I argues that this ambitious reinterpretation enriches, but does not topple, existing Dred Scott historiography. In the case of the Court's citizenship …
American Racial Jusice On Trial - Again: African American Reparations, Human Rights, And The War On Terror, Eric K. Yamamoto, Susan K. Serrano, Michelle Natividad Rodriguez
American Racial Jusice On Trial - Again: African American Reparations, Human Rights, And The War On Terror, Eric K. Yamamoto, Susan K. Serrano, Michelle Natividad Rodriguez
Michigan Law Review
Much has been written recently on African American reparations and reparations movements worldwide, both in the popular press and scholarly publications. Indeed, the expanding volume of writing underscores the impact on the public psyche of movements for reparations for historic injustice. Some of that writing has highlighted the legal obstacles faced by proponents of reparations lawsuits, particularly a judicial system that focuses on individual (and not group-based) claims and tends to squeeze even major social controversies into the narrow litigative paradigm of a two-person auto collision (requiring proof of standing, duty, breach, causation, and direct injury). Other writings detail the …
Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging The Body Politic In The Reconstruction South, Lisa Cardyn
Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging The Body Politic In The Reconstruction South, Lisa Cardyn
Michigan Law Review
From its establishment in the months following the Civil War by a motley assortment of disgruntled former rebels, the first Ku Klux Klan, like its many vigilante counterparts, employed terror to realize its invidious social and political aspirations. This terror assumed disparate shapes - from the storied nightriding of disguised bands on horseback, to cryptic threats, horrific assaults, and, not infrequently, murder. While students of Reconstruction have considered many facets of klan violence, none to date has focused exclusively on sexual violence in its historical specificity. Yet, as the work of Catherine Clinton, Laura Edwards, and Martha Hodes persuasively demonstrates, …
What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White
What's Wrong With Our Talk About Race? On History, Particularity, And Affirmative Action, James Boyd White
Michigan Law Review
One of the striking and original achievements of the Michigan Law Review in its first century was the publication in 1989 of a Symposium entitled Legal Storytelling. Organized by the remarkable editor-in-chief, Kevin Kennedy - who tragically died not long after his graduation - the Symposium not only brought an important topic to the forefront of legal thinking, it did so in an extraordinarily interesting way. For this was not a mere collection of papers; the authors met in small editorial groups to discuss their work in detail, and as a result the whole project has a remarkable coherence and …
Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath
Caste, Class, And Equal Citizenship, William E. Forbath
Michigan Law Review
There is a familiar egalitarian constitutional tradition and another we have largely forgotten. The familiar one springs from Brown v. Board of Education; its roots lie in the Reconstruction era. Court-centered and countermajoritarian, it takes aim at caste and racial subordination. The forgotten one also originated with Reconstruction, but it was a majoritarian tradition, addressing its arguments to lawmakers and citizens, not to courts. Aimed against harsh class inequalities, it centered on decent work and livelihoods, social provision, and a measure of economic independence and democracy. Borrowing a phrase from its Progressive Era proponents, I will call it the social …
The Devil And The One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, And The U.S. Census, Christine B. Hickman
The Devil And The One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, And The U.S. Census, Christine B. Hickman
Michigan Law Review
For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the "one drop rule," which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of "hypodescent" and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race …
Civil Liberties And Civil War: The Great Emancipator As Civil Libertarian, Paul Finkelman
Civil Liberties And Civil War: The Great Emancipator As Civil Libertarian, Paul Finkelman
Michigan Law Review
A Review of The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties by Mark E. Neely, Jr.
In Re Radical Interpretations Of American Law: The Relation Of Law And History, A. E. Keir Nash
In Re Radical Interpretations Of American Law: The Relation Of Law And History, A. E. Keir Nash
Michigan Law Review
This Article centers instead upon assessing two types of legal analysis - non-Marxist radical interpretation and "non-reductionist" Marxist theory - which, despite conspicuous differences, share the belief that understanding the American historical experience is a prerequisite to understanding American law. Both approaches also share two other important convictions. One is that a "consensual" or "liberal pluralist" version of American history has little explanatory validity, at least in regard to such major problems as the political and legal breakdown represented by the Civil War, and the law's role in American economic development. They also agree that historical explanations which downplay discussion …
Civil Rights - Legislation - The Civil Rights Act Of 1957, Thomas R. Winquist S.Ed.
Civil Rights - Legislation - The Civil Rights Act Of 1957, Thomas R. Winquist S.Ed.
Michigan Law Review
It is the purpose of this comment to note the nature of the prior legislation in the civil rights area, the provisions of the new act and the effect of the new act upon civil rights protection.
The Fourteenth Amendment Reconsidered, The Segregation Question, Alfred H. Kelly
The Fourteenth Amendment Reconsidered, The Segregation Question, Alfred H. Kelly
Michigan Law Review
Some sixty years ago in Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court of the United States adopted the now celebrated "separate but equal" doctrine as a constitutional guidepost for state segregation statutes. Justice Brown's opinion declared that state statutes imposing racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, provided only that the statute in question guaranteed equal facilities for the two races. Brown's argument rested on a historical theory of the intent, although he offered no evidence to support it. "The object of the amendment," he said, "was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, …
The Unhappy History Of Civil Rights Legislation, Eugene Gressman
The Unhappy History Of Civil Rights Legislation, Eugene Gressman
Michigan Law Review
The enforcement by federal legislation of the constitutional right of individuals is a story written largely in terms of confusion, distortion and frustration. Seldom, if ever, have the power and the purposes of legislation been rendered so impotent. Indeed, this story constitutes one of the saddest chapters in the historic struggle to effectuate the American ideal of freedom and equality for all.