Law and Race Commons^™

Justice For All: Demanding Accessibility For Underrepresented Communities In The Law: A Roger Williams University Law Review, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Color Of Creatorship - Author's Response, Anjali Vats

Articles

This essay is the author's response to three reviews of The Color of Creatorship written by notable intellectual property scholars and published in the IP Law Book Review.

Decitizenizing Asian Pacific American Women, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Margaret Hu

Faculty Publications

The Page Act of 1875 excluded Asian women immigrants from entering the United States, presuming they were prostitutes. This presumption was tragically replicated in the 2021 Atlanta Massacre of six Asian and Asian American women, reinforcing the same harmful prejudices. This Article seeks to illuminate how the Atlanta Massacre is symbolic of larger forms of discrimination, including the harms of decitizenship. These harms include limited access to full citizenship rights due to legal barriers, restricted cultural and political power, and a lack of belonging. The Article concludes that these harms result from the structure of past and present immigration laws …

Citizenship, Race, And Statehood, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

This Article will discuss the interplay between citizenship, race, and ratification of statehood in the United States, both historically and prospectively. Part II will discuss the development and history of the Insular Cases and the creation of the Territorial Incorporation Doctrine (“TID”), focusing on the Territory of Puerto Rico and how the issues of citizenship, race, and statehood have evolved in shadow of empire as a result. Part III will look back on the admission to the Union of New Mexico and Arizona—the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states—and discuss the substantial difficulties these territories had in getting admitted for statehood due …

Black Citizenship, Dehumanization, And The Fourteenth Amendment, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The fight for full Black citizenship has been in large measure a fight against the systematic dehumanization of African Americans. Dehumanization is the process of treating people as less than human, as subhuman. Denying Blacks full and equal citizenship has gone hand in hand with denying their full humanity. To effectively promote equal citizenship for African Americans, therefore, requires an explicit commitment to ending their dehumanization.

In this Essay, Part I discusses the concept of dehumanization and its role in the infliction of harm on a dehumanized class of people. Part II discusses the concept of citizenship, and contend that …

The Color Of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, And The Making Of Americans (Introduction), Anjali Vats

Book Chapters

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW, the body of legal doctrine and practice that governs the ownership of information, is animated by a dichotomy of creatorship and infringement. In the most often repeated narratives of creatorship/infringement in the United States, the former produces a social and economic good while the latter works against the production of that social and economic good. Creators, those individuals whose work is deemed protectable under copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, and unfair competition law, create valuable products that contribute to economic growth and public knowledge. Infringers, those individuals who use the work of creators without their permission, steal …

Johnny Appleseed: Citizenship Transmission Laws And A White Heteropatriarchal Property Right In Philandering, Sexual Exploitation, And Rape (The Whp) Or Johnny And The Whp, Blanche Cook

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Title 8, United States Code, Section 1409-one of this country's

citizenship transmission laws-creates a white heteropatriarchal property right

in philandering, sexual exploitation, and rape (the "WHP"). Section 1409

governs the transmission of citizenship from United States citizens to their

children, where the child is born abroad, outside of marriage, and one parent is a

citizen and the other is not. Section 1409, however, draws a distinct gender

distinction between women and men: An unwed female American citizen who

births a child outside the United States, fathered by a foreign man, automatically

transmits citizenship to her child. An unwed male American …

Identity Property: Protecting The New Ip In A Race-Relevant World, Philip Lee

Journal Articles

This Article explores the relatively new idea in American legal thought that people of color are human beings whose dignity and selfhood are worthy of legal protection. While the value and protection of whiteness throughout American legal history is undeniable, non-whiteness' has had a more turbulent history. For most of American history, the concept of non-whiteness was constructed by white society and reinforced by law-i.e., through a process of socio-legal construction-in a way that excluded its possessor from the fruits of citizenship. However, people of color have resisted this negative construction of selfhood. This resistance led to the development of …

Cherokee Freedmen And The Color Of Belonging, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This article addresses the Cherokee tribe and their historic conflict with the descendants of their former black slaves, designated Cherokee Freedmen. This article specifically addresses how historic discussions of black, red and white skin colors, designating the African-ancestored, aboriginal (Native American) and European-ancestored people of the United States, have helped to shape the contours of color-based national belonging among the Cherokee. This article also suggests that Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of postcolonial mimicry offers a potent source for analyzing the Cherokee’s historic use of skin color as a marker of Cherokee membership. The Cherokee past practice of black slavery and …

Servitude, Liberté Et Citoyenneté Dans Le Monde Atlantique Des Xviiie Et Xixe Siècles: Rosalie De Nation Poulard…, Rebecca J. Scott, Jean Hebrard

Articles

On December 4, 1867, the ninth day of the convention to write a new post-Civil War constitution for the state of Louisiana, delegate Edouard Tinchant rose to propose that the convention should provide “for the legal protection in this State of all women” in their civil rights, “without distinction of race or color, or without reference to their previous condition.” Tinchant’s proposal plunged the convention into additional debates ranging from voting rights and equal protection to recognition of conjugal relationships not formalized by marriage.

This article explores the genesis of Tinchant’s conceptions of citizenship and women’s rights through three generations …

Immigration And The Meaning Of United States Citizenship: Whiteness And Assimilation, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

At the outset of the twenty-first century, United States immigration policy has become one of the most pressing issues of our time. In recent years, we have witnessed, among other things, calls for dramatically restricting immigration in light of an alleged threat to American national identity, increased border enforcement associated with thousands of deaths on the United States/Mexico border, vigilante activity, special immigration procedures enacted for the "War on Terror," and mass marches protesting draconian immigration reform in cities across the United States. Against this background, this essay seeks to explore what immigration and the various issues it raises have …

The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In 1870, a black man named Hiram Revels was named to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Senate Democrats objected to seating him and pointed out that the Constitution specifies that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for at least nine years. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Democrats argued, Revels had not been a citizen on account of the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Thus, even if Revels were a citizen in 1870, he had held that status for only two years. …

Grados De Libertad: Democracia Y Antidemocracia En Cuby Y Luisiana, 1898-1900, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This comparative study between the quest for political racial inclusivity in 1890s Louisiana and the fight against state-sanctioned racialized violence in Cuba in the early 1900s exposes similarities, tensions, and differences between the two systems. The article traces the evolving contests for citizenship and suffrage in each climate at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the twentieth, juxtaposing the expression of race, suffrage, and citizenship in the constitution and political climate of each locale. In 1898, the new Louisiana state constitution disenfranchised African-Americans, while in 1900 Cuba was positioning itself for a grant of universal …

Le 'Droit D'Avoir Des Droits': Les Revendications Des Ex-Esclaves À Cuba (1872-1909), Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske

Articles

In Cuba, a distinctive process of gradual emancipation brought a large number of enslaved and recently-freed men and women into the legal culture. What earlier might have remained oral or physical challenges now took legal form, as slaves and former slaves built alliances with those who could assist them in their appeals. The assertions of former slaves suggest an emerging conviction of a "right to have rights", going well beyond the immediate refusal of their own bondage. In this light, the office of the notary and the courts of first instance became places where freedom itself was constituted through the …

Tres Vidas, Una Guerra Rafael Iznaga, Bárbara Pérez Y Gregoria Quesada Entre La Emancipación Y La Ciudadanía, Rebecca Scott

Book Chapters

In this article, Scott takes a microhistorian approach as she looks at the ways in which three Cubans of color (Rafael Iznaga, Bárbara Pérez and Gregoria Quesada), from the same rural neighborhood, sought to define and attain citizenship during and immediately after the Cuban War of Independence from 1895-1898. Juxtaposing oral and written sources, Scott shows how such evidence can be both complementary and contradictory, and how each source should be examined in light of the others.

Rafael Iznaga fought in the war as a soldier of the Liberation Army, and returned with prestige and status. While his life can …

Identity Notes Part Ii: Redeeming The Body Politic, Adrienne D. Davis

Scholarship@WashULaw

These remarks were given in April 1996 at the First Annual LatCrit Conference, co-sponsored by California Western Law School and the Harvard Latino Law Review. While the body of Christ has not been used explicitly to order secular American law and political theory, a multi-dimensional analysis of his body in Western political theory would have to include its use at a critical historic moment as an organizing metaphor for the racial order of the United States and the consolidation of the national identity as white. Reclamation of the national identity as historically always diverse, documentation of the denial of citizenship …

The Maryland Context Of Dred Scott: The Decline In The Legal Status Of Maryland Free Blacks 1776-1810, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.