Law and Race Commons^™

Law School News: Rwu School Of Law Launches Institute For Race And The Law And Celebrates Champions For Justice 3-22-2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: From The Community, For The Community 1/21/24, Suzi Morales, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Government Sponsored Segregation On Health Inequities: Addressing Death Gaps Through Reparations, Mariya Denisenko

Washington and Lee Law Review

Government sponsored segregation of urban neighborhoods has detrimentally impacted the health of Black Americans. Over the last century, federal, state, and local governments have promulgated racist laws and policies that shaped the racial divide of communities in major metropolitan cities. This divide has contributed to poor health outcomes and large discrepancies in life expectancy for Black Americans when compared to their White counterparts. While health is impacted by various factors, segregation has been shown to impose various challenges that make it difficult for Black Americans to attain good health.

Segregated Black communities struggle with economic inequality, environmental racism, and face …

Reinvest In Us: Reimagine The Role Of Police In The U.S., Jamil Davis

College Honors Program

In America, we must question and understand what is “law and order.” Over centuries, America developed a racialized slave-class politically and socially through power and force. Police are the foot soldiers of maintaining law and order as Slave Patrols evolved into the State Police. In my thesis, I discuss how their efforts in traffic enforcement enable a dominant class to target and enslave the oppressed class. Traffic control leads to 18 million interactions a year which is 34 people a minute. The numbers of interactions along with persistent practices regarding discrimination cause police to be a social liability. When bad …

The Hyper-Incarceration Of Female Minority Juvenile Offenders Within The Juvenile And Criminal Justice Systems, Ruth C.A. Philippe

Selected Honors Theses

Young women are the fastest-growing portion of the juvenile justice system population. Girls experience risk factors at higher rates than boys, exhibit mental health issues at higher rates than boys, suffer more negative consequences from justice system involvement than system-involved boys, and are less likely to access treatment than boys. Girls are also more likely to become involved with the justice system for minor offenses such as running away or skipping school. In particular, young women of color receive unfair treatment than their counterparts. Girls of color are disadvantaged and treated differently within both the juvenile and criminal justice systems …

Healthcare Inequities In The United States And Beyond Are Taking Black Women’S Lives, Alichia Mcintosh

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Black women have been dying at devastating rates due to health complications at the hands of the United States’ healthcare and legal systems. This Note explores these distressing rates and how they compare to White women while analyzing the fatalities and diagnoses among several health complications and diseases. These fatalities persist due to the United States’ history of racism—such as the institution of slavery and over 100 years of Black bodies experiencing Jim Crow laws—and the socioeconomic disadvantages Black women disproportionally face. This Note emphasizes that these disparities continue because the United States has failed to implement treaties—which it is …

Law School News: A Voice For Justice 3-1-2023, Janine L. Weisman, Roger Williams University School O Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Thoughts On Law Clerk Diversity And Influence, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

It is my great good fortune to have been asked to comment on the remarkable Article Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights from Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals by Judge Jeremy D. Fogel, Professor Mary S. Hoopes, and Justice Goodwin Liu. Drawing on a rich vein of data gathered pursuant to a carefully crafted research design and extensive interviews, the authors provide the most detailed account to date regarding the selection criteria used by federal appeals court judges to select their law clerks. The authors pay special attention to the role that diversity plays in picking …

Teaching Slavery In Commercial Law, Carliss N. Chatman

Scholarly Articles

Public status shapes private ordering. Personhood status, conferred or acknowledged by the state, determines whether one is a party to or the object of a contract. For much of our nation’s history, the law deemed all persons of African descent to have a limited status, if given personhood at all. The property and partial personhood status of African-Americans, combined with standards developed to facilitate the growth of the international commodities market for products including cotton, contributed to the current beliefs of business investors and even how communities of color are still governed and supported. The impact of that shift in …

Sheriffs, Shills, Or Just Paying The Bills?: Rethinking The Merits Of Compelling Merchant Cooperation With Third-Party Policing In The Aftermath Of George Floyd’S Death, Stephen Wilks

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article frames the killing of George Floyd as the result of flawed business regulation. More specifically, it captures the expansion of third-party policing paradigms throughout local nuisance abatement regulations over a period of time that coincided with the militarization of policing culture across the United States. Premised on the notion that law enforcement alone cannot succeed in reducing crime and disorder, such regulations transform grocery stores, pharmacies, bars, and other retail spaces into surveillance hubs by prescribing situations that obligate businesses to contact the police. This regulatory framework, however, sustains the larger historical project of rationalizing enhanced scrutiny of …

Taking The Knee No More: Police Accountability And The Structure Of Racism, David Dante Troutt

Washington and Lee Law Review

From before the birth of the republic to the present day, police brutality has represented a signature injustice of state authority, especially against African Americans. Defining that injustice is the lack of accountability for official misconduct. The rule of law has systematically failed to deter lawbreaking by its law enforcement departments. This Article explores the various legal and institutional means by which accountability should be imposed and demonstrates the design elements of structured immunity. Using Critical Race Theory and traditional civil rights law notions of how structural racism operates, this Article argues that transformative change can only come about through …

Higher Education Redress Statutes: A Critical Analysis Of States’ Reparations In Higher Education, Christopher L. Mathis

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article introduces a novel concept, higher education redress statutes (“HERS”), to illustrate efforts that acknowledge and amend past wrongs towards African Americans. More proximally, the Article shines a probing light on the escalation of HERS in southeastern states that serve as a site for state regulation and monitoring. The Author exposes how higher education redress statutes, designed to provide relief or remedy to Black people for states’ higher education’s harm, categorically ignore groups of Black people who rightfully should also be members of the statutorily protected class. This Article queries whether legislators can expand the scope of such statutes …

Check Your Bank Account First: Examining Copyright Formalities And Remedies Through A Race Conscious Lens, Emma Burri

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note examines copyright formalities through a race conscious lens and concludes that further change is necessary given the legacy of economic inequality that communities of color experience. It examines the history of copyright formalities in the United States and the disenfranchisement of Black musical creators through the theft of their intellectual property. In exploring the relationship between race, wealth, and musical copyright protection this Note explains why considering the economic inequality is relevant to ensure copyright protection for Black creators. This Note proposes abolishing the registration timeline for certain remedies and altering the filing fee structure of the copyright …

White Picket Fences & Suburban Gatekeeping: How Long Island’S Land Use Laws Cement Its Status As One Of The Most Segregated Places In America, Jessica Mingrino

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The average wealth of Black families is one-seventh that of white families in the United States today. Homeownership—the primary avenue through which Americans accumulate personal and generational wealth—is the leading driver of the wealth disparity between white and Black American families, known as the “racial wealth gap.” The systematic and intentional exclusion of Black people from developing communities during the twentieth century largely excluded people of color from the housing boom and denied them the opportunity afforded to white people to multiply their assets. Contrary to widespread belief, however, legislation-backed oppression of Black Americans did not end in the …

The Problem Of Blackness In America: Becoming When The Being Never Comes To Be, Nkiru Anyaegbunam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The problem of Blackness in America is a consequence of the historical reality and continued legacies of colonialism, the triangular trade and chattel slavery that have been facilitated through violence and capitalism. This thesis will argue that this problem that is pronounced through racialized institutional systems of violence such as mass incarceration and housing inequality, which disproportionately negatively impacts Black Americans is part of a larger discourse on the human and (mis)recognition. This violence has created a quintessential incompleteness for Black Americans who neither are recognized as citizens nor human. The problem of Blackness will be continuously grounded in this …

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law, Michael M. Bowden, Gregory W. Bowman, Brooklyn Crockton

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Color Of Pain: Racial Bias In Pain And Suffering Damages, Maytal Gilboa

Georgia Law Review

For more than half a century, our legal system has formally eschewed race-based discrimination, and nearly every field of law has evolved to increase protections for minority groups historically burdened by racial prejudice. Yet, even today, juries in tort actions routinely consider a plaintiff’s race when calculating compensatory tort damages, and they do so in a manner that systematically results in lower awards to Black plaintiffs than to White. This Article examines this problem, zeroing in on the specific issue of racial bias in calculations of tort damages for pain and suffering.

The severity of a plaintiff’s injury is commonly …

The Chief Justice And The Page: Earl Warren, Charles Bush, And The Promise Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

In October Term 1954, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding the implementation of the Brown decision. The resulting opinion is commonly referred to as “Brown II.” In his unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered local school districts to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Supporters of immediate integration were dismayed by the vague language, which ultimately allowed southern states to use a variety of tactics to deliberately evade and resist the Court’s mandate that public schools be desegregated.

What has been forgotten in the discussion of Brown II and the “all deliberate speed” standard is that …

Movement Constitutionalism, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

The white supremacy at the heart of the American criminal legal system works to control Black, Brown, and poor people through mass incarceration. Poverty and incarceration act in a vicious circle, with reactionaries mounting a desperate defense against any attempt to mitigate economic exploitation or carceral violence. Ending the cycle will require replacing this inequitable system with the life- and liberty-affirming institutions of abolition democracy. The path to abolition democracy is arduous, but abolitionists can press for change through what I coin “movement constitutionalism.” Movement constitutionalism is the process by which grassroots abolitionist movements shift—through demands and in solidarity with …

Whiteness As Contract, Marissa Jackson Sow

Washington and Lee Law Review

2020 forced scholars, policymakers, and activists alike to grapple with the impact of “twin pandemics”—the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated Black and Indigenous communities, and the scourge of structural and physical state violence against those same communities—on American society. As atrocious acts of anti-Black violence and harassment by law enforcement officers and white civilians are captured on recording devices, the gap between Black people’s human and civil rights and their living conditions has become readily apparent. Less visible human rights abuses camouflaged as private commercial matters, and thus out of the reach of the state, are also increasingly exposed as …

Which America?: Judge Roger L. Gregory And The Tradition Of African-American Political Thought, Daniel Fryer

Washington and Lee Law Review

In this Article, written in connection with a symposium honoring Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory’s twenty years on the bench, I place Judge Gregory’s jurisprudence within the tradition of African-American political thought. I suggest that, at bottom, Judge Gregory has a leveling-up jurisprudence that seeks to interpret the Constitution in a way that ensures the least well-off in society are granted the same rights as the most privileged. This brand of democratic theorizing approximates a mainstream position by Black political theorists optimistically seeking to have the least well-off integrated into a fully equal society. By comparing and contrasting his work …

Foreword: Humanity, Dignity, And Grace, Brant J. Hellwig

Washington and Lee Law Review

Commentary from Dean Brant Hellwig of the Washington and Lee University School of Law on the 2020-2021 Annual Lara D. Gass Symposium celebrating Hon. Roger L. Gregory, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and this special issue of the Law Review featuring scholarship relating to that event.

Law School News: Rwu Law Introduces Required Course On Race And The Law 06/28/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: A Juneteenth Message From The Dean, Gregory W. Bowman

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Dean's Distinguished Service Award 2021: Ralph Tavares 05/28/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

School Finance, Race, And Reparations, Preston C. Green Iii, Bruce D. Baker, Joseph O. Oluwole

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In this article, we explain why and how school finance reform should be a part of a reparations program for Black Americans. This article proceeds in six parts. Part I explains how Black-white school funding disparities occurred during the separate-but-equal era. Part II discusses how these funding disparities have occurred in the aftermath of the Brown decision. Parts III and IV explore why school desegregation and school finance litigation, respectively, have failed to remedy these gaps. Part V lays out a reparations framework that state legislatures could adopt to provide restitution to schools and taxpayers harmed by state policies creating …

The Just Prosecutor, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

As the most powerful actors in our criminal legal system, prosecutors have been and remain one of the principal drivers of mass incarceration. This was and is by design. Prosecutorial power derives from our constitutional structure--prosecutors are given almost unfettered discretion to determine who to charge, what to charge, and, often, what the sentence will be. Within that structure, the prosecutor's duty is to ensure that justice is done. Yet, in exercising their outsized power, some prosecutors have fully embraced a secondary, adversarial role as a partisan advocate at the significant cost of seeking justice.

The necessary reforms of our …

Wearing My Crown To Work: The Crown Act As A Solution To Shortcomings Of Title Vii For Hair Discrimination In The Workplace, Margaret Goodman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rwu Law News: The Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law 12-2020, Barry Bridges, Michael M. Bowden, Nicole Dyszlewski, Louisa Fredey

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Law School News: Bright Anniversaries In Uncertain Times 10/06/2020, Nicole Dyszlewski, Louisa Fredey

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.