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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Institutional Antiracism And Critical Pedagogy: A Quantum Leap Forward For Legal Education And The Legal Academy, Danielle M. Conway
Institutional Antiracism And Critical Pedagogy: A Quantum Leap Forward For Legal Education And The Legal Academy, Danielle M. Conway
Faculty Scholarly Works
A fundamental launchpad for redeeming American society is to look to the historical and contextual goals of the Second Founding—the Reconstruction Amendments—and grasp the lessons about justice and equality for all by focusing on the principles of institutional antiracism. While our nation should deploy teaching and learning strategies at all levels of the American system of education, legal education must be out front leading the way to incorporate institutional antiracism through critical pedagogy.
This article provides the historical context in which legal education developed in the antebellum and postbellum periods and up to what might be deemed the “Third Founding” …
James Oakes's Treatment Of The First Confiscation Act In Freedom National: The Destruction Of Slavery In The United States, 1861-1865, Angi Porter
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
In his work, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, James Oakes provides an overview of several Civil War era legal instruments regarding enslavement in the United States. One of the statutes he examines is An Act to Confiscate Property Used for Insurrectionary Purposes, passed by the Thirty Seventh Congress in August, 1861. This law, popularly known as the First Confiscation Act (FCA), is one of the several "Confiscation Acts" that contributed to the weakening of legal enslavement during the War. Fortunately, scholars have contextualized and deemphasized President Lincoln's role as the "Great Emancipator" by examining …
Property And Sovereignty In America: A History Of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, K-Sue Park
Property And Sovereignty In America: A History Of Title Registries & Jurisdictional Power, K-Sue Park
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Article tells an untold history of the American title registry—a colonial bureaucratic innovation that, though overlooked and understudied, constitutes one of the most fundamental elements of the U.S. property system today. Prior scholars have focused exclusively on its role in catalyzing property markets, while mostly ignoring their main sources in the colonies -- expropriated lands and enslaved people. This analysis centers the institution’s work of organizing and “proving” claims that were not only individual but collective, to affirm encroachments on tribal nations’ lands and scaffold colonies’ tenuous but growing political, jurisdictional power. In other words, American property and property …
The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park
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 …
On The Meaning Of Color And The End Of White(Ness), William J. Aceves
On The Meaning Of Color And The End Of White(Ness), William J. Aceves
Faculty Scholarship
This Article explores the history of the term “people of color” and its current status in a country struggling to overcome its racist origins. The murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other victims of state violence have generated profound anger, calls for action, and demands for dialogue. It is undoubtedly simplistic to assert that words matter. But accurate descriptions are essential for honest conversations, and words convey meanings beyond their syntax. In discussions about race and racial identity, the term “people of color” is routinely used as the antipode to the white community. …
The Racial Reckoning Of Public Interest Law, Atinuke O. Adediran, Shaun Ossei-Owusu
The Racial Reckoning Of Public Interest Law, Atinuke O. Adediran, Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts
Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts
All Faculty Scholarship
In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …
Law & Laundry: White Laundresses, Chinese Laundrymen, And The Origins Of Muller V. Oregon, Emily Prifogle
Law & Laundry: White Laundresses, Chinese Laundrymen, And The Origins Of Muller V. Oregon, Emily Prifogle
Articles
This article uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours, the article argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place — the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon — the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. The article investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely …
The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin
The Loving Story: Using A Documentary To Reconsider The Status Of An Iconic Interracial Married Couple, Regina Austin
All Faculty Scholarship
The Loving Story (Augusta Films 2011), directed by Nancy Buirski, tells the backstory of the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state laws barring interracial marriage. The article looks to the documentary to explain why the Lovings should be considered icons of racial and ethnic civil rights, however much they might be associated with marriage equality today. The film shows the Lovings to be ordinary people who took their nearly decade long struggle against white supremacy to the nation’s highest court out of a genuine commitment to each other and a determination to live in …
Public Lands, Conservation, And The Possibility Of Justice, Sarah Krakoff
Public Lands, Conservation, And The Possibility Of Justice, Sarah Krakoff
Publications
On December 28, 2016, President Obama issued a proclamation designating the Bears Ears National Monument pursuant to his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the President to create monuments on federal public lands. Bears Ears, which is located in the heart of Utah’s dramatic red rock country, contains a surfeit of ancient Puebloan cliff-dwellings, petroglyphs, pictographs, and archeological artifacts. The area is also famous for its paleontological finds and its desert biodiversity. Like other national monuments, Bears Ears therefore readily meets the statutory objective of preserving “historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific …
The Progressives: Racism And Public Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Progressives: Racism And Public Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
American Progressivism inaugurated the beginning of the end of American scientific racism. Its critics have been vocal, however. Progressives have been charged with promotion of eugenics, and thus with mainstreaming practices such as compulsory housing segregation, sterilization of those deemed unfit, and exclusion of immigrants on racial grounds. But if the Progressives were such racists, why is it that since the 1930s Afro-Americans and other people of color have consistently supported self-proclaimed progressive political candidates, and typically by very wide margins?
When examining the Progressives on race, it is critical to distinguish the views that they inherited from those that …
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
Intersectionality And The Constitution Of Family Status, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
Marital supremacy—the legal privileging of marriage—is, and always has been, deeply intertwined with inequalities of race, class, gender, and region. Many if not most of the plaintiffs who challenged legal discrimination based on family status in the 1960s and 1970s were impoverished women, men, and children of color who made constitutional equality claims. Yet the constitutional law of the family is largely silent about the status-based impact of laws that prefer marriage and disadvantage non-marital families. While some lower courts engaged with race-, sex-, and wealth-based discrimination arguments in family status cases, the Supreme Court largely avoided recognizing, much less …
Agenda: A Celebration Of The Work Of Charles Wilkinson: Served With Tasty Stories And Some Slices Of Roast, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment
Agenda: A Celebration Of The Work Of Charles Wilkinson: Served With Tasty Stories And Some Slices Of Roast, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment
A Celebration of the Work of Charles Wilkinson (Martz Winter Symposium, March 10-11)
Conference held at the University of Colorado, Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom, Thursday, March 10th and Friday, March 11th, 2016.
Conference moderators, panelists and speakers included University of Colorado Law School professors Phil Weiser, Sarah Krakoff, William Boyd, Kristen Carpenter, Britt Banks, Harold Bruff, Richard Collins, Carla Fredericks, Mark Squillace, and Charles Wilkinson
"We celebrate the work of Distinguished Professor Charles Wilkinson, a prolific and passionate writer, teacher, and advocate for the people and places of the West. Charles's influence extends beyond place, yet his work has always originated in a deep love of and commitment to particular places. We …
The Role Of The Courts In Creating Racial Identity In Early New Orleans, Jack M. Beermann
The Role Of The Courts In Creating Racial Identity In Early New Orleans, Jack M. Beermann
Faculty Scholarship
Reviewing Kenneth R. Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York University Press 2014).
The racial history of New Orleans is unique among American cities, as is Louisiana's among the history of American states. In the antebellum period, there were more free people of color in New Orleans than in any other city in the South, and free people of color lived, and often prospered, throughout Louisiana. The presence of so many free people of color in New Orleans, and Louisiana more generally, arose from many factors, including the consequences …
Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over The Constitutional Meaning Of Equality, Helen Norton
Recovering Forgotten Struggles Over The Constitutional Meaning Of Equality, Helen Norton
Publications
No abstract provided.
Governing By Guidance: Civil Rights Agencies And The Emergence Of Language Rights, Ming Hsu Chen
Governing By Guidance: Civil Rights Agencies And The Emergence Of Language Rights, Ming Hsu Chen
Publications
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this Article asks how federal civil rights laws evolved to incorporate the needs of non-English speakers following landmark immigration reform (the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act) that led to unprecedented migration from Asia and Latin America. Based on a comparative study of the emergence of language rights in schools and workplaces from 1965 to 1980, the Article demonstrates that regulatory agencies used nonbinding guidances to interpret the undefined statutory term "national origin discrimination" during their implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Their efforts facilitated the creation of language rights, …
Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee
Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee
All Faculty Scholarship
Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …
Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri
Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
A Defensible Defense?: Reexamining Castle Doctrine Statutes, Benjamin Levin
A Defensible Defense?: Reexamining Castle Doctrine Statutes, Benjamin Levin
Publications
Recent years have seen a proliferation of so-called “castle doctrine” statutes – laws that provide home dwellers with more expansive self-defense protections if they resort to lethal force in confrontations with intruders. The passage of such laws and subsequent uses of the defense have captured the public imagination, prompting significant media attention, as well as skeptical and critical scholarship from the legal academic community.
Considering the current prevalence of castle laws and the often polarized nature of the debate concerning their application, this Article argues that it is important to excavate the doctrine from the culture wars rhetoric in which …
Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventheenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks
Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood And Racialized Identity In Seventheenth Century Colonial Virginia, Taunya Lovell Banks
Faculty Scholarship
Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude—slavery in the mid-seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry—English; her …
Mestizaje And The Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There Is No Blackness, Taunya Lovell Banks
Mestizaje And The Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There Is No Blackness, Taunya Lovell Banks
Faculty Scholarship
Many legal scholars who write about Mexican mestizaje omit references to Afromexicans, Mexico’s African roots, and contemporary anti-black sentiments in the Mexican and Mexican American communities. The reasons for the erasure or invisibility of Mexico’s African roots are complex. It argues that post-colonial officials and theorists in shaping Mexico’s national image were influenced two factors: the Spanish colonial legacy and the complex set of rules creating a race-like caste system with a distinct anti-black bias reinforced through art; and the negative images of Mexico and Mexicans articulated in the United States during the early nineteenth century. The post-colonial Mexican becomes …
A Brief History Of The U.S.-American Indian Nations Relationship, Richard B. Collins
A Brief History Of The U.S.-American Indian Nations Relationship, Richard B. Collins
Publications
No abstract provided.
Recovering Homelands, Governance, And Lifeways: A Book Review Of Blood Struggle: The Rise Of Modern Indian Nations, Kristen A. Carpenter
Recovering Homelands, Governance, And Lifeways: A Book Review Of Blood Struggle: The Rise Of Modern Indian Nations, Kristen A. Carpenter
Publications
No abstract provided.
Beyond Indian Law: The Rehnquist Court’S Pursuit Of States’ Rights, Color-Blind Justice And Mainstream Values, David H. Getches
Beyond Indian Law: The Rehnquist Court’S Pursuit Of States’ Rights, Color-Blind Justice And Mainstream Values, David H. Getches
Publications
No abstract provided.
Tricky Magic: Blacks As Immigrants And The Paradox Of Foreignness, Lolita K. Buckner Inniss
Tricky Magic: Blacks As Immigrants And The Paradox Of Foreignness, Lolita K. Buckner Inniss
Publications
Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the "outsider." Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the first epithets that many …
To Feel The Summer In The Spring: The Treaty Fishing Rights Of The Wisconsin Chippewa, Charles F. Wilkinson
To Feel The Summer In The Spring: The Treaty Fishing Rights Of The Wisconsin Chippewa, Charles F. Wilkinson
Publications
In this Article, adapted from his Oliver Rundell Lecture delivered at the University of Wisconsin Law School in April 1990, Professor Charles Wilkinson explores the historical and contemporary conflict arising out of the Chippewa people's assertion of nineteenth century treaty fishing rights. A key to comprehending the Chippewa's position is a realization that they are governments whose sovereign rights predate the United States Constitution and are preserved in federal treaties and statutes. The Chippewa's survival as a people depends upon a recognition of their sovereign prerogatives, an understanding of their history, a respect for their dignity and a just application …
The Law Of The American West: A Critical Bibliography Of The Nonlegal Sources, Charles F. Wilkinson
The Law Of The American West: A Critical Bibliography Of The Nonlegal Sources, Charles F. Wilkinson
Publications
No abstract provided.
Narf North: Alaska Office Opens, Charles F. Wilkinson
Narf North: Alaska Office Opens, Charles F. Wilkinson
Publications
No abstract provided.