Law and Race Commons^™

Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series: Beyond The Casebook: Deib And Supplementary Materials 2023, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Startup Biases, Jennifer S. Fan

Articles

This Article provides an original descriptive account of bias in the startup context and explains why litigation is eschewed and what happens when it is used as a mechanism to combat bias in the venture capital ecosystem. Further, this Article identifies two particular phenomena in the startup context that exacerbate gender and racial bias. First, homophily—the idea that like attracts like—abounds and has been part of the DNA of venture capital since its inception. The thick networks that developed as venture capital made its way from the East Coast to the West Coast were limited to an elite group that …

Law School News: Should Prison Be Abolished? 10-6-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

"With All The Majesty Of The Law": Systemic Racism, Punitive Sentiment, And Equal Protection, Darren L. Hutchinson

Faculty Articles

United States criminal justice policies have played a central role in the subjugation of persons of color. Under slavery, criminal law explicitly provided a means to ensure White dominion over Blacks and require Black submission to White authority. During Reconstruction, anticrime policies served to maintain White supremacy and re-enslave Blacks, both through explicit discrimination and facially neutral policies. Similar practices maintained racial hierarchy with respect to White, Latinx, and Asian-American populations in the western United States. While most state action no longer explicitly discriminates on the basis of race, anticrime policy remains a powerful instrument of racial subordination. Indeed, social …

Reframing Hate, Lu-In Wang

Articles

The concept and naming of “hate crime,” and the adoption of special laws to address it, provoked controversy and raised fundamental questions when they were introduced in the 1980s. In the decades since, neither hate crime itself nor those hotly debated questions have abated. To the contrary, hate crime has increased in recent years—although the prominent target groups have shifted over time—and the debate over hate crime laws has reignited as well. The still-open questions range from the philosophical to the doctrinal to the pragmatic: What justifies the enhanced punishment that hate crime laws impose based on the perpetrator’s motivation? …

Considering "Machine Testimony": The Impact Of Facial Recognition Software On Eyewitness Identifications, Valena Beety

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article uses a wrongful conviction lens to compare identifications by machines, notably facial recognition software, with identifications by humans. The Article advocates for greater reliability checks on both before use against a criminal defendant. The Article examines the cascading influence of facial recognition software on eyewitness identifications themselves and the related potential for greater errors. As a solution, the Article advocates the inclusion of eyewitness identification in the Organization of Scientific Area Committees' ("OSAC") review of facial recognition software for a more robust examination and consideration of software and its usage. The Article also encourages police departments to adopt …

The Social Psychology Of Inclusion: How Diversity Framing Shapes Outcomes For Racial-Ethnic Minorities, Jamillah Bowman Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Research on the efficacy of organizational diversity efforts has yielded mixed results. It remains unclear when positive or negative outcomes should be expected, and why. This article fills a gap in the sociological literature by examining critical social psychological mechanisms. In Experiment 1, I found that common diversity messaging led to increased bias towards racial minorities. In Experiment 2, I examined how alternative framing may influence these outcomes. Findings revealed that the common “business case” emphasizing profit and performance gains made decision-makers less likely to select a Black job candidate than emphasizing civil rights law. I then examined social psychological …

Mediation: Embedded Assumptions Of Whiteness?, Sharon Press, Ellen E. Deason

Faculty Scholarship

This article attempts to uncover some of the systemic ways in which white supremacy is expressed in the practice of mediation in the United States with the goal of inspiring additional conversations and deeper attention to these issues by scholars and practitioners in the field of dispute resolution. Our methodology is to apply the themes in Layla F. Saad’s book, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor (2020). We use the lenses of tone policing, color-blindness, racial stereotyping, anti-blackness, white silence, and white supremacy to reflect on the following aspects of mediation: communication …

Mine The Gap: Using Racial Disparities To Expose And Eradicate Racism, James S. Liebman, Kayla C. Butler, Ian Buksunski

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, lawyers and legal scholars have disagreed over how much resource redistribution to expect from federal courts and Congress in satisfaction of the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection. Of particular importance to this debate and to the nation given its kaleidoscopic history of inequality, is the question of racial redistribution of resources. A key dimension of that question is whether to accept the Supreme Court's limitation of equal protection to public actors' disparate treatment of members of different races or instead demand constitutional remedies for the racially disparate impact of public action.

For a substantial segment of the …

Law Library Blog (February 2020): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law: The Magazine Of Roger Williams University School Of Law (Issue 10, 25th Anniversary Issue) (May 2019), Roger Williams University School Of Law

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

Implicit Bias's Failure, Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

The 2016 presidential election was a coming-out party of sorts for the concept of implicit bias-and not necessarily in a good way. In answering a question about race relations and the police during the vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence introduced the topic. Offering his explanation for why the Fraternal Order of Police had endorsed the Trump-Pence ticket, Pence said:

Illuminating Black Data Policing, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The future of policing will be driven by data. Crime, criminals, and patterns of criminal activity will be reduced to data to be studied, crunched, and predicted. The benefits of big data policing involve smarter policing, faster investigation, predictive deterrence, and the ability to visualize crime problems in new ways. Not surprisingly then, police administrators have been seeking out new partnerships with sophisticated private data companies and experimenting with new surveillance technologies. This potential future, however, has a very present limitation. It is a limitation largely ignored by adopting jurisdictions and could, if left unaddressed, delegitimize the adoption and use …

A Genealogy Of Programmatic Stop And Frisk: A Discourse-To-Practice-Circuit, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

President Trump has called for increased use of the recently predominant policing methodology known as programmatic stop and frisk. This Article contributes to the field by identifying, defining, and discussing five key components of the practice: (1) administratively dictated (2) pervasive Terry v. Ohio stops and frisks (3) aimed at crime prevention by means of (4) data-enhanced profiles of suspects that (5) target young racial minority men. Whereas some scholars see programmatic stop and frisk as solely the product of individual police officer bias, this Article argues for understanding how we arrived at specific police practices by analyzing three levels …

Tightening The Ooda Loop: Police Militarization, Race, And Algorithmic Surveillance, Jeffrey L. Vagle

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the role military automated surveillance and intelligence systems and techniques have supported a self-reinforcing racial bias when used by civilian police departments to enhance predictive policing programs. I will focus on two facets of this problem. First, my research will take an inside-out perspective, studying the role played by advanced military technologies and methods within civilian police departments, and how they have enabled a new focus on deterrence and crime prevention by creating a system of structural surveillance where decision support relies increasingly upon algorithms and automated data analysis tools, and which automates de facto penalization and …

A Frank & Honest Talk: Aall’S Diversity Symposium Takes On Hard Questions Of Creating And Maintaining Diversity In The Legal Community, Lauren M. Collins

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

"Getting a Rise Out of Diversity: Celebrating the Challenge" took on hard questions of diversity, while keeping the spirit of New Orleans alive through celebration. With speakers who work to maintain diversity in legal practice and education every day, participants engaged in a lively discussion of what diversity actually is and how to create and sustain it.

Disparity Rules, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992, Congress required states receiving federal juvenile justice funds to reduce racial disparities in the confinement rates of minority juveniles. This provision, now known as the disproportionate minority contact standard (DMC), is potentially more far-reaching than traditional disparate impact standards: It requires the reduction of racial disparities regardless of whether those disparities were motivated by intentional discrimination orjustified by "legitimate" agency interests. Instead, the statute encourages states to address how their practices exacerbate racial disadvantage.

This Article casts the DMC standard as a partial response to the failure of constitutional and statutory standards to discourage actions that produce racial …

Discrimination In Sentencing On The Basis Of Afrocentric Features, William T. Pizzi, Irene V. Blair, Charles M. Judd

Publications

For a long time, social scientists have worried about possible racial discrimination in sentencing in the United States. With a prison population that exceeds two million inmates of whom approximately 48% are African American, the worry over the fairness of the sentencing process is understandable. This article is not about discrimination between racial categories as such, but about a related form of discrimination, namely, discrimination on the basis of a person's Afro-centric features. Section I of the article describes a line of social science research that shows that a person's Afro-centric features have a strong biasing effect on judgment such …

By Any Other Name?: On Being “Regarded As” Black, And Why Title Vii Should Apply Even If Lakisha And Jamal Are White, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Mario Barnes

Faculty Scholarship

Forty years after the passage of Title VII, scholars Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan reported the results of their groundbreaking study, Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination. Their study revealed that simply having an African American-sounding name significantly decreased one's opportunity to receive a job interview, regardless of occupation or industry. The results of Bertrand and Mullainathan's investigation raise critical questions about the effectiveness of Title VII as a remedy for race discrimination in the hiring market today, especially as employment discrimination has evolved into different forms. As shown …

Infected Judgment: Legal Responses To Physician Bias, Mary Crossley

Articles

Substantial evidence indicates that clinically irrelevant patient characteristics, including race and gender, may at times influence a physician's choice of treatment. Less clear, however, is whether a patient who is the victim of a biased medical decision has any effective legal recourse. Heedful of the difficulties of designing research to establish conclusively the role of physician bias, this article surveys published evidence suggesting the operation of physician bias in clinical decision making. The article then examines potential legal responses to biased medical judgments. A patient who is the subject of a biased decision may sue her doctor for violating his …

How Much Do We Really Know About Race And Juries? A Review Of Social Science Theory And Research, Samuel R. Sommers, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

The past decade has witnessed numerous high-profile criminal trials in which controversial verdicts have been attributed to racethe race of the defendant, the racial composition of a jury, an attorney "playing the race card," and so on. A predominantly Black jury's acquittal of O.J. Simpson and White jurors' leniency in the police brutality cases of Rodney King and Amadou Diallo not only sparked public debate, but also led to rioting and violence. In the wake of trials such as these, many have questioned the viability of the American jury system.' More specific questions regarding the influence of race on jury …

'Suitable Targets'? Parallels And Connections Between 'Hate Crimes' And 'Driving While Black', Lu-In Wang

Articles

While hate crimes may tend to be less routine and more violent than discriminatory traffic stops, closer examination of each shows the need to complicate our understanding of both. The work of social scientists who have studied racial profiling reveals striking similarities and connections between these two practices. In particular, both hate crimes and racial profiling tend to be condemned only at extremes, in situations where they appear to be irrational and excessive, but overlooked in cases where they seem logical or are expected. The tendency to see only the most extreme cases as problematic, however, fails to recognize that …

Race In The Courtroom: Perceptions Of Guilt And Dispositional Attributions, Samuel R. Sommers, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Articles

The present studies compare the judgments of White and Black mock jurors in interracial trials. In Study 1, the defendant’s race did not influence White college students’ decisions but Black students demonstrated ingroup/outgroup bias in their guilt ratings and attributions for the defendant’s behavior. The aversive nature of modern racism suggests that Whites are motivated to appear nonprejudiced when racial issues are salient; therefore, the race salience of a trial summary was manipulated and given to noncollege students in Study 2. Once again, the defendant’s race did not influence Whites when racial issues were salient. But in the non-race-salient version …

Unspeakable Suspicions: Challenging The Racist Consensual Encounter, Peter Schoenburg, Risa Evans

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "In recent years, law enforcement officials have honed a new technique for fighting the "War on Drugs:" the suspicionless police sweep of stations and vehicles involved in interstate mass transportation. Single officers or groups of officers approach unfortunate individuals in busses, trains, stations and airline terminals. A targeted traveller is requested to show identification and tickets, explain the purpose of his or her travels, and finally, at times, to consent to a luggage search. As long as "a reasonable person would understand that he or she could refuse to cooperate," the encounter between the law-enforcement official and the traveller …

State Responses To Task Force Reports On Race And Ethnic Bias In The Courts, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

While several states have embarked on studies of race and ethnic bias in their courts, Minnesota is only the sixth to publish its report to date. As Minnesota joins the ranks of states with published reports, it is worthwhile to assess the impact of the five earlier published reports from other states. Final reports have been published in Michigan (1989), Washington (1990), New York (1991), Florida (1991) and New Jersey (1992). The published reports make findings and provide several specific recommendations for change. This article will review the published findings and recommendations of the task forces and will discuss the …