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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Equal Protection Under Algorithms: A New Statistical And Legal Framework, Crystal S. Yang, Will Dobbie
Equal Protection Under Algorithms: A New Statistical And Legal Framework, Crystal S. Yang, Will Dobbie
Michigan Law Review
In this Article, we provide a new statistical and legal framework to understand the legality and fairness of predictive algorithms under the Equal Protection Clause. We begin by reviewing the main legal concerns regarding the use of protected characteristics such as race and the correlates of protected characteristics such as criminal history. The use of race and nonrace correlates in predictive algorithms generates direct and proxy effects of race, respectively, that can lead to racial disparities that many view as unwarranted and discriminatory. These effects have led to the mainstream legal consensus that the use of race and nonrace correlates …
Eight Months Later, Ellen D. Katz
Eight Months Later, Ellen D. Katz
Reviews
Rick Hasen’s Election Meltdown provides a concise and scathing analysis of what ails the American electoral process. Rick identifies four “principal dangers”—namely, voter suppression, “pockets of incompetence” in election administration, “dirty tricks,” and “incendiary rhetoric” about stolen or rigged elections. He argues that these dangers have contributed to past dysfunctional elections and are sure to infect future ones. Election Meltdown closes with some proposals to temper the identified dangers so as to make voting less difficult and restore confidence in the electoral process.
Man’S Best Friend? How Dogs Have Been Used To Oppress African Americans, Shontel Stewart
Man’S Best Friend? How Dogs Have Been Used To Oppress African Americans, Shontel Stewart
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The use of dogs as tools of oppression against African Americans has its roots in slavery and persists today in everyday life and police interactions. Due to such harmful practices, African Americans are not only disproportionately terrorized by officers with dogs, but they are also subject to instances of misplaced sympathy, illsuited laws, and social exclusion in their communities. Whether extreme and violent or subtle and pervasive, the use of dogs in oppressive acts is a critical layer of racial bias in the United States that has consistently built injustices that impede social and legal progress. By recognizing this pattern …
Discerning A Dignitary Offense: The Concept Of Equal 'Public Rights' During Reconstruction, Rebecca J. Scott
Discerning A Dignitary Offense: The Concept Of Equal 'Public Rights' During Reconstruction, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
The mountain of modern interpretation to which the language of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been subjected tends to overshadow the multiple concepts of antidiscrimination that were actually circulating at the time of its drafting. Moreover, as authors on race and law have pointed out, Congress itself lacked any African American representatives during the 1866–68 moment of transitional justice. The subsequent development of a “state action doctrine” limiting the reach of federal civil rights enforcement, in turn, eclipsed important contemporary understandings of the harms that Reconstruction-era initiatives sought to combat. In contrast to the oblique language …
When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms And The Practice Of Criminal Law, Ngozi Okidegbe
When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms And The Practice Of Criminal Law, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
We are in the midst of a fraught debate in criminal justice reform circles about the merits of using algorithms. Proponents claim that these algorithms offer an objective path towards substantially lowering high rates of incarceration and racial and socioeconomic disparities without endangering community safety. On the other hand, racial justice scholars argue that these algorithms threaten to entrench racial inequity within the system because they utilize risk factors that correlate with historic racial inequities, and in so doing, reproduce the same racial status quo, but under the guise of scientific objectivity.
This symposium keynote address discusses the challenge that …
Reassessing Aspects Of The Contribution Of African States To The Development Of International Law Through African Regional Multilateral Treaties, Tiyanjana Maluwa
Reassessing Aspects Of The Contribution Of African States To The Development Of International Law Through African Regional Multilateral Treaties, Tiyanjana Maluwa
Michigan Journal of International Law
For decades, debates about Africa’s contribution to the development of international law have been dominated by two opposing schools of thought. First, that European colonial powers deliberately erased Africa and Africans from the history of the creation and use of international law. Second, that, on the contrary, over the last six decades (since the emergence of the newly independent African states in the late 1950s and early 1960s), Africa has contributed to the making of international law and has not been merely a passive recipient of a Eurocentric international law.
This article underscores the role of the postcolonial periphery in …
Dignity Transacted: Emotional Labor And The Racialized Workplace, Lu-In Wang, Zachary W. Brewster
Dignity Transacted: Emotional Labor And The Racialized Workplace, Lu-In Wang, Zachary W. Brewster
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In interactive customer service encounters, the dignity of the parties becomes the currency of a commercial transaction. Service firms that profit from customer satisfaction place great emphasis on emotional labor, the work that service providers do to make customers feel cared for and esteemed. But performing emotional labor can deny dignity to workers by highlighting their subservience and requiring them to suppress their own emotions in an effort to elevate the status and experiences of their customers. Paradoxically, the burden of performing emotional labor may also impose transactional costs on some customers by facilitating discrimination in service delivery. Drawing on …
Dismantling The Master’S House: Toward A Justice-Based Theory Of Community Economic Development, Etienne C. Toussaint
Dismantling The Master’S House: Toward A Justice-Based Theory Of Community Economic Development, Etienne C. Toussaint
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Since the end of the American Civil War, scholars have debated the efficacy of various models of community economic development, or CED. Historically, this debate has tracked one of two approaches: place-based models of CED, seeking to stimulate community development through market-driven economic growth programs, and people-based models of CED, focused on the removal of structural barriers to social and economic mobility that prevent human flourishing. More recently, scholars and policymakers have turned to a third model from the impact investing community—the social impact bond, or SIB. The SIB model of CED ostensibly finds a middle ground by leveraging funding …
For Cause: Rethinking Racial Exclusion And The American Jury, Thomas Ward Frampton
For Cause: Rethinking Racial Exclusion And The American Jury, Thomas Ward Frampton
Michigan Law Review
Peremptory strikes, and criticism of the permissive constitutional framework regulating them, have dominated the scholarship on race and the jury for the past several decades. But we have overlooked another important way in which the American jury reflects and reproduces racial hierarchies: massive racial disparities also pervade the use of challenges for cause. This Article examines challenges for cause and race in nearly 400 trials and, based on original archival research, presents a revisionist account of the Supreme Court’s three most recent Batson cases. It establishes that challenges for cause, no less than peremptory strikes, are an important—and unrecognized—vehicle of …
Segregation In The Galleries: A Reconsideration, Richard Primus
Segregation In The Galleries: A Reconsideration, Richard Primus
Michigan Law Review Online
When constitutional lawyers talk about the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as applied to questions of race, they often men-tion that the spectators’ galleries in Congress were racially segregated when Congress debated the Amendment.1 If the Thirty-Ninth Congress practiced racial segregation, the thinking goes, then it probably did not mean to prohibit racial segregation.2 As an argument about constitutional interpretation, this line of thinking has both strengths and weaknesses. But this brief Essay is not about the interpretive consequences, if any, of segregation in the congressional galleries during the 1860s. It is about the factual claim that the galleries …
The Right To Be And Become: Black Home-Educators As Child Privacy Protectors, Najarian R. Peters
The Right To Be And Become: Black Home-Educators As Child Privacy Protectors, Najarian R. Peters
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The right to privacy is one of the most fundamental rights in American jurisprudence. In 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis conceptualized the right to privacy as the right to be let alone and inspired privacy jurisprudence that tracked their initial description. Warren and Brandeis conceptualized further that this right was not exclusively meant to protect one’s body or physical property. Privacy rights were protective of “the products and the processes of the mind” and the “inviolate personality.” Privacy was further understood to protect the ability to “live one’s life as one chooses, free from assault, intrusion or …
Equality At The Cemetery Gates: Study Of An African American Burial Ground, William A. Engelhart
Equality At The Cemetery Gates: Study Of An African American Burial Ground, William A. Engelhart
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
In Charlottesville, Virginia, the University Cemetery serves as the final resting place of many of the most prominent community members of the University of Virginia. In 2011, the University planned an expansion. During archaeological research to this end, sixty-seven previously unidentified interments, in both adult and child-sized grave shafts, were discovered on the proposed site of expansion, to the northeast of the University Cemetery. Further archival research revealed that “at least two late nineteenth century references note that enslaved African Americans were buried north of but outside the enclosed University, in an adjacent wooded area.” In one, Col. Charles Christian …
Symbolism And The Thirteenth Amendment: The Injury Of Exposure To Governmentally Endorsed Symbols Of Racial Superiority, Edward H. Kyle
Symbolism And The Thirteenth Amendment: The Injury Of Exposure To Governmentally Endorsed Symbols Of Racial Superiority, Edward H. Kyle
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
One of the debates often encountered by native southerners centers around our historical symbols. There are heated opinions on both sides of the issue as to what these symbols mean and whether they should be allowed to be displayed. The latter question has begun making its way into the courts, with many southern symbols and memorials being accused of promoting the philosophy of racial supremacy. Despite the growing public concern, modern courts refuse to rule on the question. They claim they are forestalled by Article III’s standing requirement that plaintiffs must have suffered a concrete injury in fact. They state …
Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai
Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai
Michigan Law Review
Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.