Law and Race Commons^™

The Punishment Of Hate: Toward A Normative Theory Of Bias-Motivated Crimes, Frederick M. Lawrence

Michigan Law Review

This article explores how bias crimes differ from parallel crimes and why this distinction makes a crucial difference in our criminal law. Bias crimes differ from parallel crimes as a matter of both the resulting harm and the mental state of the offender. The nature of the injury sustained by the immediate victim of a bias crime exceeds the harm caused by a parallel crime. Moreover, bias crimes inflict a palpable harm on the broader target community of the crime as well as on society at large, while parallel crimes do not generally cause such widespread injury.

The distinction between …

Erasing Race From Legal Education, Judith G. Greenberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Article, Professor Greenberg argues that law schools claim to treat African American students as if their race is irrelevant, yet law school curricula have a hidden message that African American students are in fact inferior and dangerous to white students. When African American students do not perform as well as white students, they are assumed to have deficient skills and are placed in remedial programs to improve those skills. Professor Greenberg argues that the cause of African American students' poor performance in law school is not necessarily deficient skills, but rather a bias inherent in the structure of …