Law and Race Commons^™

Law School News: Dean Bowman On The Scotus Admissions Decision 6-29-2023, Gregory W. Bowman

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

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.

The Color Line: A Review And Reflection For Antiracist Scholars, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

In The Color Line: A Short Introduction, David Lyons provides a valuable service to students and academics in law, social sciences, and humanities by providing a concise history of the development and maintenance of race and racial order through law, policy, and discrimination in the United States. Lyons effectively outlines how race and racism were developed through these mechanisms in an effort to facilitate and maintain white supremacy.

Law School News: Remembering John Lewis 07-18-2020, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Amazing Dorothy Crockett: How An African-American Woman From Providence Became, In 1932, The 7th Woman Ever Admitted To The Rhode Island Bar 05-14-2019, Michael M. Bowden

RWU Law

No abstract provided.

The Unrelenting Libertarian Challenge To Public Accommodations Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

There seems to be a broad consensus that Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination in “place[s] of public accommodation,” was a remarkable success. But the consensus is illusory. Laws prohibiting discrimination by public accommodations currently exist under a significant legal threat. And this threat is merely the latest iteration in the controversy over public accommodations laws that began as early as Reconstruction. This Article begins by discussing the controversy in the Reconstruction and Civil Rights Eras over the penetration of antidiscrimination principles into the realm of private businesses’ choice of customers. Although the …

Dignité/Dignidade: Organizing Against Threats To Dignity In Societies After Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

This chapter is not an attempt to join the fractious debate over philosophical first principles or juridical first usages of the term 'dignity'. Instead, it explores the tight connection between the institution of slavery and the giving of specific meanings to the concept of dignity, in particular times and particular places. To explore the dynamics of the intertwined process of creating and drawing upon meaning for the terms 'dignity' and 'slavery', I examine two historical movements that emerged after formal abolition.

Paper Thin: Freedom And Re-Enslavement In The Diaspora Of The Haitian Revolution, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carre and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified …

Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.

Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Our book Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2009) highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impact tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume will provide an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It will be …

Created In Its Image: The Race Analogy, Gay Identity, And Gay Litigation In The 1950s-1970s, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

Existing accounts of early gay rights litigation largely focus on how the suppression and liberation of gay identity affected early activism. This Note helps complicate these dynamics, arguing that gay identity was not just suppressed and then liberated, but substantially transformed by activist efforts during this period, and that this transformation fundamentally affected the nature of gay activism. Gay organizers in the 1950s and 1960s moved from avoiding identity-based claims to analogizing gays to African-Americans. By transforming themselves in the image of a successful black civil rights minority, activists attempted to win over skeptical courts in a period when equal …

Microhistory Set In Motion: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary, Rebecca J. Scott

Book Chapters

Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane is a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and his family. By contrast, Mintz’s Sweetness and Power gains its force from taking the entire Atlantic world as its scope, examining the marketing, meanings, and consumption of sugar as they changed over time. This essay borrows from each of these two strategies, looking at the history of a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the …

Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

From French and Creole to Spanish, the domain of the Napoleonic Empire to the king of Spain, crossing the strait separating the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the Spanish colony of Cuba entailed a change of language and government. Some 18,000 people made that transition between the spring and summer of 1803 during the Revolutionary War in Saint-Dominque. Six years later, many crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to New Orleans and the recently acquired Louisiana Territory under the authority of a territorial governor and the United States Congress. What would these crossings lead to for those who had …

The Meaning Of Race In The Dna Era: Science, History And The Law, Christian Sundquist

Articles

The meaning of “race” has changed dramatically over time. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, moral and physical values to perceived physical differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-white persons. Nazi Germany applied these understandings of race in a manner which shocked the world, and following World War II the concept of race increasingly came to be …

Tax As Urban Legend, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

In this essay, I review UC-Berkeley history professor Robin Einhorn's book, American Taxation, American Slavery. In this provocatively-titled book, Einhorn traces the relationship between democracy, taxation, and slavery from colonial times through the antebellum period. By re-telling some of the most familiar set piece stories of American history through the lens of slavery, Einhorn reveals how the stories that we tell ourselves over and over again about taxation and politics in America are little more than the stuff of urban legend.

In the review, I provide a brief summary of Einhorn's discussion of the relationship between slavery and colonial taxation, …

Servitude, Liberté Et Citoyenneté Dans Le Monde Atlantique Des Xviiie Et Xixe Siècles: Rosalie De Nation Poulard…, Rebecca J. Scott, Jean Hebrard

Articles

On December 4, 1867, the ninth day of the convention to write a new post-Civil War constitution for the state of Louisiana, delegate Edouard Tinchant rose to propose that the convention should provide “for the legal protection in this State of all women” in their civil rights, “without distinction of race or color, or without reference to their previous condition.” Tinchant’s proposal plunged the convention into additional debates ranging from voting rights and equal protection to recognition of conjugal relationships not formalized by marriage.

This article explores the genesis of Tinchant’s conceptions of citizenship and women’s rights through three generations …

Criminal Justice And The 1967 Detroit 'Riot', Yale Kamisar

Articles

Forty years ago the kindling of segregation, racism, and poverty burst into the flame of urban rioting in Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, and other U.S. cities. The following essay is excerpted from a report by Professor Emeritus Yale Kamisar filed with the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) regarding the disorders that took place in Detroit July 23-28, 1967. The report provided significant material and was the subject of one article in the series of pieces on the anniversary of the disturbances that appeared last summer in The Michigan Citizen of Detroit. Immediately after the disturbances ended, …

The Riddle Of Hiram Revels, Richard A. Primus

Articles

In 1870, a black man named Hiram Revels was named to represent Mississippi in the Senate. Senate Democrats objected to seating him and pointed out that the Constitution specifies that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for at least nine years. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Democrats argued, Revels had not been a citizen on account of the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Thus, even if Revels were a citizen in 1870, he had held that status for only two years. …

Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery.

Se Battre Our Ses Droits Écritures, Litiges Et Discrimination Raciale En Louisiane (1888-1899), Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

Title in English: Fighting for public rights: writing, lawsuits and racial segregation in Louisiana (1888-1889).

This article explores the links between the fight against compulsory racial segregation and the day–to–day operation of the law in nineteenth century Louisiana. Using the figure of Louis A. Martinet, one of the organizers of the test case that yielded the U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, the essay argues that Martinet’s role as notary reflects the central importance to the community of color of questions of public standing and written records. The article also identifies the concepts of "public rights" and "public liberties" …