Legal History Commons^™

Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai

Michigan Law Review

Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

The Outcome Of Influence: Hitler’S American Model And Transnational Legal History, Mary L. Dudziak

Michigan Law Review

Review of James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.

Cleansing Moments And Retrospective Justice, Margaret M. Russell

Michigan Law Review

We live in an era of questioning and requestioning long-held assumptions about the role of race in law, both in criminal prosecutions specifically and in the legal process generally. Certainly, the foundational framework is not new; for decades, both legal literature and jurisprudence have explored in great detail the realities of racism in the legal system. Even among those who might prefer to ignore the role of race discrimination in more than two centuries of American law, denial is no longer a viable or intellectually defensible option. Rather, debate now centers upon whether or not the extensive history of American …

Some Effects Of Identity-Based Social Movements On Constitutional Law In The Twentieth Century, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Michigan Law Review

What motivated big changes in constitutional law doctrine during the twentieth century? Rarely did important constitutional doctrine or theory change because of formal amendments to the document's text, and rarer still because scholars or judges "discovered" new information about the Constitution's original meaning. Precedent and common law reasoning were the mechanisms by which changes occurred rather than their driving force. My thesis is that most twentieth century changes in the constitutional protection of individual rights were driven by or in response to the great identity-based social movements ("IBSMs") of the twentieth century. Race, sex, and sexual orientation were markers of …

Blood Will Tell: Scientific Racism And The Legal Prohibitions Against Miscegenation, Keith E. Sealing

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This article first examines the miscegenation paradigm in terms of a seven-point conceptual framework that not merely allowed but practically demanded anti-miscegenation laws, then looks at the legal arguments state courts used to justify the constitutionality of such laws through 1967. Next, it analyzes the Biblical argument, which in its own right justified miscegenation, but also had a major influence on the development of the three major strands of scientific racism: monogenism, polygenism and Darwinian theory. It then probes the concept upon which the entire edifice is constructed-race--and discusses the continuing vitality of this construct. Next, this article turns to …

The Devil And The One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, And The U.S. Census, Christine B. Hickman

Michigan Law Review

For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the "one drop rule," which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of "hypodescent" and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race …

History's Stories, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Stories of Scottsboro by James Goodman

The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation, David D. Meyer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation by Charles A. Lofgren

The Naacp's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, Robert L. Carter

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 by Mark Tushnet

To Set The Law In Motion: The Freedmen's Bureau And The Legal Rights Of Blacks, 1865-1868, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of To Set the Law in Motion: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Legal Rights of Blacks, 1865-1868 by Donald G. Nieman

Racial Prejudice And Scholarly Prejudice: New Confrontations At The Selma Bridge, J. Mills Thornton Iii

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by David J. Garrow

The School Desegregation Cases In Retrospect—Some Reflections On Causes And Effects, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

Recently, when asked to give a lecture on appellate advocacy, Justice Thurgood Marshall reminded his audience what Judge Benjamin Cardozo had once said: "The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass judges by." An outstanding example, he might have added, is Brown v. Board of Education.

In a sense, the significant changes which have occurred in the Black man's status in the last two decades had their beginnings in the rise of numerically, and hence politically, important Black communities in the North. For the importance of civil rights …