Law and Race Commons^™

Integrating Doctrine And Diversity Speaker Series: When Law School Classroom Discussions Of Diversity Issues Go Wrong, Roger Williams University School Of Law, City University Of New York School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

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.

Maximizing #Metoo: Intersectionality & The Movement, Jamillah Bowman Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although women of color experience high rates of harassment and assault, the #MeToo movement has largely left them on the margins in terms of (1) the online conversation, (2) the traditional social movement activity occurring offline, and (3) the consequential legal activity. This Article analyzes how race shapes experiences of harassment and how seemingly positive legal strides continue to fail women of color thirty years beyond Kimberlé Crenshaw’s initial framing of intersectionality theory. I discuss the weaknesses of the reform efforts and argue for more tailored strategies that take into account the ineffectiveness of our current Title VII framework and, …

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.

Seeing Color: America's Judicial System, Elizabeth Poulin

Senior Honors Projects

In many eyes, it often seems as though being white in America is easy, or a privilege. Being white in America is considered a safety blanket, with an abundance of opportunities beneath it. Yet, how does a physical difference such as skin color manifest itself as privilege? Noticing color is not wrong, hateful, or oppressive. Even children notice color, and we define them as the ultimate innocence. But in fact, skin color is often a trigger. When the world has preconceived notions about people of color, an oppressive system designed to harm people who have never done anything to deserve …

Tax Benefits, Higher Education And Race: A Gift Tax Proposal For Direct Tuition Payments, Bridget J. Crawford, Wendy C. Gerzog

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article combines three topics--taxes, higher education, and race--to evaluate the tax system's role in exacerbating racial inequalities. Part II frames the discussion with a brief overview of the economics of higher education: how much it costs, how much debt the average student incurs to afford it, and how that debt burden varies by race. Part III describes the major income and wealth transfer tax benefits for higher education, including I.R.C. § 2503(e)'s exclusion of direct tuition payments from gift tax. Part IV demonstrates how this gift tax exclusion disproportionately benefits white families already more likely to avail themselves …

To What Extent Is The Death Penalty A Tool Of Racial Terror In America, And How Can We Fix It?, Gabrielle Boileau

Honors Projects

In this project, I seek to answer the question: To what extent is the death penalty a tool of racial terror in America, and how can we fix it? America has long been plagued by the legacy of slavery and white supremacy. In the reconstruction era, when slavery was no longer legal, angry white citizens would simply round up African-Americans and lynch them if they felt they had done something “wrong”. However, in the modern era, such blatant displays of racism are illegal, and the racist views of society are subverted into the court system. Black men are disproportionately arrested …

What Is Cultural Misappropriation And Why Does It Matter? 03-31-2021, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Fair Housing’S Third Act: American Tragedy Or Triumph?, Heather R. Abraham

Journal Articles

Fifty-two years ago, Congress enacted a one-of-a-kind civil rights directive. It requires every federal agency—and state and local grantees by extension—to take affirmative steps to undo segregation. In 2020, this overlooked Fair Housing Act provision—the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” or “AFFH” mandate—has heightened relevance. Perhaps most visible is Donald Trump’s racially charged “protect the suburbs” campaign rhetoric. In an apparent appeal to suburban constituents, his administration repealed a race-conscious fair housing rule, replacing it with a no-questions-asked regulation that elevates “local control” above civil rights.

The maneuver is especially stark as protesters fill the streets, marching in opposition to systemic …

Law Library Blog (March 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Political (Mis)Representation Of Immigrants In Voting, Ming H. Chen, Hunter Knapp

Publications

Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This Essay describes several barriers facing immigrants and naturalized citizens that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers on the basis of immigrants and foreign-born voters having rights of semi-citizenship. By placing naturalization backlogs, voting restrictions, and reapportionment battles in the historical context of voter suppression, it provides a descriptive and normative account of the political misrepresentation of immigrants.

Models, Race, And The Law, Moon Duchin, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

Capitalizing on recent advances in algorithmic sampling, The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights explores the implications of the long-standing conservative dream of certified race neutrality in redistricting. Computers seem promising because they are excellent at not taking race into account—but computers only do what you tell them to do, and the rest of the authors’ apparatus for measuring minority electoral opportunity failed every check of robustness and numerical stability that we applied. How many opportunity districts are there in the current Texas state House plan? Their methods can give any answer from thirty-four to fifty-one, depending on invisible settings. But …

The Biopolitics Of Maskless Police, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Despite the recent movement against police violence, police officers have been endangering their communities by engaging in a new form of violence— policing while refusing to wear facial coverings to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Many states advise people to wear masks and to socially distance when in public spaces. However, police officers have frequently failed to comply with these guidelines as they interact with the public to enforce these COVID-19 laws. Police enforcement of COVID-19 laws is problematic for two reasons: (1) it provides a method for pathologizing marginalized communities as biological threats; (2) it creates a racialized pathway …

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.

Prisons, Nursing Homes, And Medicaid: A Covid-19 Case Study In Health Injustice, Mary Crossley

Articles

The unevenly distributed pain and suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic present a remarkable case study. Considering why the coronavirus has devastated some groups more than others offers a concrete example of abstract concepts like “structural discrimination” and “institutional racism,” an example measured in lives lost, families shattered, and unremitting anxiety. This essay highlights the experiences of Black people and disabled people, and how societal choices have caused them to experience the brunt of the pandemic. It focuses on prisons and nursing homes—institutions that emerged as COVID-19 hotspots –and on the Medicaid program.

Black and disabled people are disproportionately represented in …

Temporality In A Time Of Tam, Or Towards A Racial Chronopolitics Of Intellectual Property Law, Anjali Vats

Articles

This Article examines the intersections of race, intellectual property, and temporality from the vantage point of Critical Race Intellectual Property ("CRTIP"). More specifically, it offers one example of how trademark law operates to normalize white supremacy by and through judicial frameworks that default to Euro-American understandings of time. I advance its central argument-that achieving racial justice in the context of intellectual property law requires decolonizing Euro-American conceptions of time by considering how the equitable defense of laches and the judicial power to raise issues sua sponte operate in trademark law. I make this argument through a close reading of the …

Decolonizing Indigenous Migration, Angela R. Riley, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

As global attention turns increasingly to issues of migration, the Indigenous identity of migrants often remains invisible. At the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, a significant number of the individuals now being detained are people of indigenous origin, whether Kekchi, Mam, Achi, Ixil, Awakatek, Jakaltek or Qanjobal, coming from communities in Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and other countries. They may be leaving their homelands precisely because their rights as Indigenous Peoples, for example the right to occupy land collectively and without forcible removal, have been violated. But once they reach the United States, they are treated as any other migrants, without regard …

Policing And "Bluelining", Aya Gruber

Publications

In this Commentary written for the Frankel Lecture symposium on police killings of Black Americans, I explore the increasingly popular claim that racialized brutality is not a malfunction of policing but its function. Or, as Paul Butler counsels, “Don’t get it twisted—the criminal justice system ain’t broke. It’s working just the way it’s supposed to.” This claim contradicts the conventional narrative, which remains largely accepted, that the police exist to vindicate the community’s interest in solving, reducing, and preventing crime. A perusal of the history of organized policing in the United States, however, reveals that it was never mainly about …

It's About Bloody Time And Space, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

Time frames relationships of power, especially in the context of law. One of the clearest ways in which time is implicated in both law and society is via discourses about women’s biological functions. This Article is an introduction to a larger project that analyzes legal discourses regarding a crucial aspect of women’s calendrically-associated biological functions: women’s menstrual periods. Over the course of the project, I explore legal discourses about menstruation through the notion of what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin calls “chronotopes”—a connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. Temporality, Bakhtin argues, is closely associated with certain paradigmatic spaces, and the combination …

The Political (Mis)Representation Of Immigrants In The Census, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

Who is a member of the political community? What barriers to inclusion do immigrants face as outsiders to this political community? This article describes several barriers facing immigrants that impede their political belonging. It critiques these barriers not on the basis of immigrants’ rights but based on their rights as current and future members of the political community. This is the second of two Essays. The first Essay focused on voting restrictions impacting Asian American and Latino voters. The second Essay focuses on challenges to including immigrants, Asian Americans, and Latinos in the 2020 Census. Together, the Essays critique the …

Black Citizenship, Dehumanization, And The Fourteenth Amendment, Reginald Oh

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The fight for full Black citizenship has been in large measure a fight against the systematic dehumanization of African Americans. Dehumanization is the process of treating people as less than human, as subhuman. Denying Blacks full and equal citizenship has gone hand in hand with denying their full humanity. To effectively promote equal citizenship for African Americans, therefore, requires an explicit commitment to ending their dehumanization.

In this Essay, Part I discusses the concept of dehumanization and its role in the infliction of harm on a dehumanized class of people. Part II discusses the concept of citizenship, and contend that …

Reckoning With Race And Disability, Jasmine E. Harris

All Faculty Scholarship

Our national reckoning with race and inequality must include disability. Race and disability have a complicated but interconnected history. Yet discussions of our most salient socio-political issues such as police violence, prison abolition, healthcare, poverty, and education continue to treat race and disability as distinct, largely biologically based distinctions justifying differential treatment in law and policy. This approach has ignored the ways in which states have relied on disability as a tool of subordination, leading to the invisibility of disabled people of color in civil rights movements and an incomplete theoretical and remedial framework for contemporary justice initiatives. Legal scholars …

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 …

Skimmed Milk: Reflections On Race, Health, And What Families Tell Us About Structural Racism, Robin A. Lenhardt, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Racial Architecture Of Criminal Justice, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

One of the pleasures of contributing to symposia—especially symposia where each contribution is brief—is the ability to engage in new explorations, test new ideas, and offer new provocations. I do that now in this essay about race, architecture, and criminal justice. I begin by discussing how race is imbricated in the architecture of courthouses, the quintessential place of supposed justice. I then take race and architecture a step further. If we think of architecture expansively—Lawrence Lessig’s definition of architecture as “the physical world as we find it” comes to mind—then it becomes clear that race is also imbricated in the …

Fair Allocation At Covid-19 Mass Vaccination Sites, William F. Parker, Govind C. Persad, Monica E. Peek

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

On February 26, 2021, the Federal Emergency and Management Agency (FEMA) announced 18 community vaccination centers in major cities capable of administering up to 6000 vaccines daily. Mass vaccination sites like these arrive amid staggering socioeconomic and racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination. Black and Hispanic people are being vaccinated at less than half the rate of White people, despite being twice as likely to die of COVID-19. The wealth gap is similarly substantial, reaching up to a 65% difference between the wealthiest and poorest counties in Connecticut. The federal government is supporting mass vaccination sites, in part, to alleviate disparities, …

Prosecuting Civil Asset Forfeiture On Contingency Fees: Looking For Profit In All The Wrong Places, Louis S. Rulli

All Faculty Scholarship

Civil asset forfeiture has strayed far from its intended purpose. Designed to give law enforcement powerful tools to combat maritime offenses and criminal enterprises, forfeiture laws are now used to prey upon innocent motorists and lawful homeowners who are never charged with crimes. Their only sins are that they are carrying legal tender while driving on busy highways or providing shelter in their homes to adult children and grandchildren who allegedly sold small amounts of low-level drugs. Civil forfeiture abuses are commonplace throughout the country with some police even armed with legal waivers for property owners to sign on the …

Private Confederate Monuments, Jessica Owley, Jess Phelps, Sean W. Hughes

Articles

As public Confederate monuments finally begin to come down across the nation, we are seeing an emergence of Confederate monuments on private lands. The number of private Confederate monuments is increasing both with the construction of new monuments and, more significantly, the relocation of monuments from public land. This Article explains why private Confederate monuments are likely to be the next battleground over these controversial and troubling statues. Through ten detailed examples, we show how private Confederate monuments emerge and how communities are responding to them. The challenges related to monuments on private land are different than those on public …

Introduction: What Matters For Black Workers After 2020?, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

This paper operates as the Introduction to a Symposium that resulted from a Call for Papers discussing the topic of "What Matters for Black Workers after 2020?" to be published in the 25th volume of the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal for 2021. This paper briefly discusses the papers in that Symposium publication authored by Jamillah Bowman Williams, Michael Duff, and Henry Chambers that address this topic. I thank Noah Zatz, Marty Malin, Michael Oswalt, Marcia McCormick, and Tristan Kirvan for their dedicated efforts, feedback, and encouragement in completing this Symposium issue for the journal on this very important …

Toward A Law And Politics Of Racial Solidarity, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The killings of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and others have occurred under different factual circumstances, in different states, at the hands of both state and private actors, and have engendered different levels of outrage on the basis of their perceived egregiousness. Collectively and cumulatively, they have forced Americans to, once again, wrestle with the visible manifestation of racism and structural inequality. This confrontation is not simply a function of the inability to avert one’s eyes when faced with incontrovertible evidence of evident inhumanity and abject degradation, though it is in part that. After all, how to justify the …