Law and Race Commons^™

The Insights, Uses, And Ethics Of Social Neuroscience In Anti-Discrimination Law, Susan Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The article explores the uses in anti-discrimination law of social neuroscience—a broad interdisciplinary field that draws on the insights of brain science, medicine, epidemiology, social psychology, behavioral economics, moral cognitive neuroscience and many other experimentally based disciplines. It discusses the promising uses of social neuroscience findings from all these subfields on such matters as the irrational biases of “fast” thinking processes in general, and implicit biases against “out” groups more specifically, as well as group conformity, the black sheep effect, and more. The article traces a few of the ways these insights can help inform anti-discrimination law in both particular …

Velvet Rope Discrimination, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

All Faculty Scholarship

Public accommodations are private and public facilities that are held out to and used by the public. Public accommodations were significant battlegrounds for the Civil Rights Movement as protesters and litigators fought for equal access to swimming pools, movie theaters, and lunch counters. These sites were also important for the Women’s Rights Movement, which challenged sexist norms that prohibited their service in bars and restaurants if they were unaccompanied by men. Tragically, public accommodation law has fallen off the civil rights race and gender agenda. This inattention exists despite media accounts, case law, and empirical data that demonstrate that discrimination …

Race, Dignity, And Commerce, Lu-In Wang

Articles

This Essay was written at the invitation of the Journal of Law and Commerce to contribute a piece on racism and commerce—an invitation that was welcome and well timed. It arrived as renewed attention was focused on racialized policing following the killing of George Floyd and in the midst of the worsening pandemic that highlighted unrelenting racial, social, and economic inequities in our society.

The connections between racism and commerce are potentially numerous, but the relationship between discriminatory policing and commerce might not be apparent. This Essay links them through the concept of dignity. Legal scholar John Felipe Acevedo has …

Litigation For The People, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Reviews

Can anti-discrimination litigation be a tool for social change? For many years, a contingent on the academic left contended that the answer is no. The Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS) of the 1970s and ’80s argued that using litigation to enforce rights privileged lawyers, fed an alienating and individualized discourse, and ultimately had a depoliticizing effect. CLS adherents believed that anti-discrimination laws often legitimated, rather than challenged, the fundamental inequalities of society.

Although CLS is no longer a presence in law schools, its ideas live on. Its critique of rights litigation has been bolstered by the opposition to identity politics …

Dignity Transacted, Lu-In Wang, Zachary W. Brewster

Articles

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 …

At The Tipping Point: Race And Gender Discrimination In A Common Economic Transaction, Lu-In Wang

Articles

This Article examines the ubiquitous, multibillion dollar practice of tipping as a vehicle for race and gender discrimination by both customers and servers and as a case study of the role that organizations play in producing and promoting unequal treatment. The unique structure of tipped service encounters provides plenty of opportunities and incentives for the two parties to discriminate against one another. Neither customers nor servers are likely to find legal redress for the kinds of discrimination that are most likely to occur in tipped service transactions, however, because many of the same features of the transaction that promote discrimination …