Law and Race Commons^™

The Black-White Paradigm’S Continuing Erasure Of Latinas: See Women Law Deans Of Color, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

The Black-white paradigm persists with unintended consequences. For example, there have been only six Latina law deans to date with only four presently serving. This Article provides data about women law deans of color, the dearth of Latina law deans, and explanations for the data. It focuses on the enduring Black-white paradigm, as well as other external and internal forces. This Article suggests how to increase the number of Latina law deans and emphasizes why it matters.

The Pathological Whiteness Of Prosecution, India Thusi

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Criminal law scholarship suffers from a Whiteness problem. While scholars appear to be increasingly concerned with the racial disparities within the criminal legal system, the scholarship’s focus tends to be on the marginalized communities and the various discriminatory outcomes they experience as a result of the system. Scholars frequently mention racial bias in the criminal legal system and mass incarceration, the lexical descendent of overcriminalization. However, the scholarship often fails to consider the roles Whiteness and White supremacy play as the underlying logics and norms driving much of the bias in the system.

This Article examines the ways that Whiteness …

An Argument Against Unbounded Arrest Power: The Expressive Fourth Amendment And Protesting While Black, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

Protesting is supposed to be revered in our democracy, considered “as American as apple pie” in our nation’s mythology. But the actual experiences of the 2020 racial justice protesters showed that this supposed reverence for political dissent and protest is more akin to American folklore than reality on the streets. The images from those streets depicted police officers clad in riot gear and armed with shields, batons, and “less than” lethal weapons aggressively arresting protesters, often en masse. In the first week of the George Floyd protests, police arrested roughly 10,000 people, and approximately 78 percent of those arrests were …

Race And Regulation Podcast Episode 2 - Why Are There So Few Black Financial Regulators?, Chris Brummer

Penn Program on Regulation Podcasts

For generations, regardless of which party has controlled the White House, Black leaders have been virtually absent across the federal government’s financial regulatory bodies—a state of affairs that has severely limited the representation of Black communities and their interests in financial policy decisions in the United States. Chris Brummer of Georgetown Law discusses why longstanding racial disparities in financial regulatory leadership continue even today—and what changes might be required to overcome them.

Law School News: Welcome, Professor Bernard Freamon 04-20-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

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.

Hip Hop And The Law : Presented By Intellectual Property Law Association 03/31/2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely …

Citizenship, Race, And Statehood, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

This Article will discuss the interplay between citizenship, race, and ratification of statehood in the United States, both historically and prospectively. Part II will discuss the development and history of the Insular Cases and the creation of the Territorial Incorporation Doctrine (“TID”), focusing on the Territory of Puerto Rico and how the issues of citizenship, race, and statehood have evolved in shadow of empire as a result. Part III will look back on the admission to the Union of New Mexico and Arizona—the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states—and discuss the substantial difficulties these territories had in getting admitted for statehood due …

The New Jim And Jane Crow Intersect: Challenges To Defending The Parental Rights Of Mothers During Incarceration, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Family law scholars and advocates have expressed the importance of providing counsel to parents in the family regulation system, especially parents who are incarcerated, because of the system’s complexities. This article establishes, however, that when mothers must navigate both the family regulation and criminal legal systems, the protections appointed parents’ counsel are supposed to provide are weakened. These harms are heightened especially for Black mothers within the carceral state. As this article shows, appointed lawyers in family regulation cases cannot properly protect the due process rights of mothers who are incarcerated because of the added challenges both mothers and their …

Of Afrofuturism, Of Algorithms, Ngozi Okidegbe

Faculty Scholarship

Algorithms are proliferating in criminal legal structures. The predictions produced by these algorithms inform life-altering decisions around surveillance and incarceration. Their continued use poses a challenge to ongoing racial justice efforts. Contesting how algorithms of today maintain the racial status quo requires a fundamental rethinking of the algorithm project. This essay explores how Afrofuturism can facilitate such a rethinking. It imagines how applying an Afrofuturist paradigm to the adoption, construction, implementation, and oversight of algorithms could radically change the kind of algorithms developed and the purposes for which they are developed. Tapping into this potential offers the chance for members …

Racial And Ethnic Ancestry Of The Nation's Black Law Students: An Analysis Of Data From The Lssse Survey, Kevin D. Brown, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article proceeds in three substantive parts. In Part I, we discuss the changing racial and ethnic ancestries of Black people in the United States since affirmative action began. In Part II, we discuss the LSSSE data set that we use along with our weighting procedure based on the ABA data. Also in Part II, we discuss the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), a subset of the American Community Survey (ACS). We use the ACS PUMS to provide comparative national data to analyze the relative representation of each group of Blacks among law students. In Part III, we present the …

Civil Rights Catch 22s, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Civil rights advocates have long viewed litigation as a vital path to social change. In many ways, it is. But in key respects that remain underexplored in legal scholarship, even successful litigation can hinder remedial projects. This perverse effect stems from civil rights doctrines that incentivize litigants (or their attorneys) to foreground community plight—such as academic underachievement or overincarceration. Rational plaintiffs, responding in kind, deploy legal narratives that tend to track racial stereotypes and regressive theories of inequality. When this occurs, even successful lawsuits can harden the structural and behavioral forces that produce and perpetuate racial inequality.

I refer to …

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

Articles

Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

Critical Tax Theory: Insights From The Us And Opportunities For All, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Articles

At a moment when Australia -- and the world -- finds itself at a "critical juncture" as it reckons with a global pandemic as well as the inequalities that COVID-19 has laid bare, voicing -- and listening to -- critical tax perspectives has become more vital than ever. The economic impact of COVID-19 has precipitated talk of tax reform as nations consider how to pay for aid distributed during the pandemic and how to restart their economies. But more than just a time of crisis, the pandemic can be seen as an unexpected opportunity to break with a past plagued …

The Racial Politics Of Fair Use Fetishism, Anjali Vats

Articles

This short essay argues that the sometimes fetishistic desire on the part of progressive intellectual property scholars to defend fair use is at odds with racial justice. Through a rereading of landmark fair use cases using tools drawing from Critical Race Intellectual Property (“CRTIP”), it contends that scholars, lawyers, judges, practitioners, and activists would be well served by focusing on how fair use remains grounded in whiteness as (intellectual) property. It argues for doing so by rethinking the purpose of the Copyright Act of 1976 to be inclusive of Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors.

Whiteness As Contract, Marissa Jackson Sow

Faculty Publications

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 …

Changemakers: Master Of Studies In Law: 'Radical Imagination, Radical Listening', Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Race-Specific, State-Specific Covid-19 Vaccination Rates Adjusted For Age, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Kaitlyn M. Berry, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The authors provide the first age-standardized race/ethnicity-specific, state-specific vaccination rates for the United States. Data encompass all states reporting race/ethnicity-specific vaccinations and reflect vaccinations through mid-October 2021, just before eligibility expanded below age 12. Using indirect age standardization, the authors compare racial/ethnic state vaccination rates with national rates. The results show that white and Black state median vaccination rates are, respectively, 89 percent and 76 percent of what would be predicted on the basis of age; Hispanic and Native rates are almost identical to what would be predicted; and Asian American/Pacific Islander rates are 110 percent of what would be …

Towards Racial Justice: The Role Of Medical-Legal Partnerships, Medha D. Makhlouf

Faculty Scholarly Works

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) integrate knowledge and practices from law and health care in pursuit of health equity. However, the MLP movement has not reached its full potential to address racial health inequities, in part because its original framing was not explicitly race conscious. This article aims to stimulate discussion of the role of MLPs in racial justice. It calls for MLPs to name racism as a social determinant of health and to examine how racism may operate in the field. This work sets the stage for the next step: operationalizing racial justice in the MLP model, research, and practice.

Does U.S. Federal Employment Law Now Cover Caste Discrimination Based On Untouchability?: If All Else Fails There Is The Possible Application Of Bostock V. Clayton County, Kevin D. Brown, Lalit Khandare, Annapurna Waughray, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, Theodore M. Shaw

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article discusses the issue of whether a victim of caste discrimination based on untouchability can assert a claim of intentional employment discrimination under Title VII or Section 1981. This article contends that there are legitimate arguments that this form of discrimination is a form of religious discrimination under Title VII. The question of whether caste discrimination is a form of race or national origin discrimination under Title VII or Section 1981 depends upon how the courts apply these definitions to caste discrimination based on untouchability. There are legitimate arguments that this form of discrimination is recognized within the concept …

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 …

How Agencies Can Better Regulate For Racial Justice, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

On his first day in office, President Joseph R. Biden signed an executive order to advance racial equity throughout the federal government by taking a “systematic approach to embedding fairness in decision-making,” redressing inequities, and advancing equal opportunity in agency policies and programs.

This order is an important step. President Biden’s executive order promises new, proactive engagement by the administrative state to promote racial equity and other dimensions of inclusion in agency programs. But federal administrative agencies have played a key role in structuring racial segregation and sustaining racial inequality in housing, health care, access to transit, and wealth. President …

Towards A Psychological Science Of Abolition Democracy: Insights For Improving Theory And Research On Race And Public Safety, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Phillip Atiba Goff

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that Du Bois (1935) articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produce disparities in public safety in the U.S, both harming Black people and the institutions that could keep them safe, psychologists must take seriously questions of history and structure in addition to immediate situations. In the present article, we consider the state of knowledge regarding psychological processes …

A Call To Dismantle Systemic Racism In Criminal Legal Systems, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: In October 2021, APA passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. The present report, developed to inform APA’s policy resolution, details the scope of the problem and offers recommendations for policy and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, it acknowledges the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color as compared to White people. Next, the report reviews existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities …

Getting To Death: Race And The Paths Of Capital Cases After Furman, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Garth Davies, Ray Paternoster

Faculty Scholarship

Decades of research on the administration of the death penalty have recognized the persistent arbitrariness in its implementation and the racial inequality in the selection of defendants and cases for capital punishment. This Article provides new insights into the combined effects of these two constitutional challenges. We show how these features of post-Furman capital punishment operate at each stage of adjudication, from charging death-eligible cases to plea negotiations to the selection of eligible cases for execution and ultimately to the execution itself, and how their effects combine to sustain the constitutional violations first identified 50 years ago in Furman …

Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications For Law, Carmen G. Gonzalez, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

The theory of racial capitalism offers insights into the relationship between class and race, providing both a structural and a historical account of the ways in which the two are linked in the global economy. Law plays an important role in this. This article sketches what we believe are two key structural features of racial capitalism: profit-making and race-making for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, …

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, …