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Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Virgil Darnell Hawkins Collection: A Special Collection At The Heart Of An Hbcu Law School, Yolanda P. Jones

Library Faculty Publications

The Florida A&M University College of Law has several special collections, but the most significant of those special collections is one that is on the fourth floor of the law library. When you look at it you will see several ranges of books that are outdated. They include case reporters, statutes, secondary sources and other legal materials that are no older than the 1960s. This collection, frozen in time, is named in honor of Virgil Darnell Hawkins, an African-American who, while little known, was critical to the creation of the Florida A&M University College of Law and had an impact …

Acting Differently: How Science On The Social Brain Can Inform Antidiscrimination Law, Susan Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Legal scholars are becoming increasingly interested in how the literature on implicit bias helps explain illegal discrimination. However, these scholars have not yet mined all of the insights that science on the social brain can offer antidiscrimination law. That science, which researchers refer to as social neuroscience, involves a broadly interdisciplinary approach anchored in experimental natural science methodologies. Social neuroscience shows that the brain tends to evaluate others by distinguishing between "us" versus "them" on the basis of often insignificant characteristics, such as how people dress, sing, joke, or otherwise behave. Subtle behavioral markers signal social identity and group membership, …

Slouching Toward Universality: A Brief History Of Race, Voting, And Political Participation, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Immigration Unilateralism And American Ethnonationalism, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This paper arose from an invited symposium on "Democracy in America: The Promise and the Perils," held at Loyola University Chicago School of Law in Spring 2019. The essay places the Trump administration’s immigration and refugee policy in the context of a resurgent ethnonationalist movement in America as well as the constitutional politics of the past. In particular, it argues that Trumpism’s suspicion of foreigners who are Hispanic or Muslim, its move toward indefinite detention and separation of families, and its disdain for so-called “chain migration” are best understood as part of an assault on the political settlement of the …

Slouching Toward Universality: A Brief History Of Race, Voting, And Political Participation, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this brief history of race and voting in the United States, we look at five distinctive yet interrelated moments. The first is the founding period, a moment when the framers put our constitutional structure in place and set the initial federalist calculus in favor of the existing states. This is perhaps the most important moment in the story. The framers chose to allow the states to define the criteria for voting qualifications for federal elections. Instead of uniformity and centralization, they opted for diversity and decentralization. This is a choice that reverberates to this day. The second moment is …

Race, Slavery And Justice: A Justice System Case Study, Camille Cameron

Reports & Public Policy Documents

We do not have to look far today in Canada to see the legacies of slavery in their full effect. One of these legacies is the way in which we have chosen to forget slavery, or perhaps to deny it, and to create a different narrative. “Slavery is Canada’s best-kept secret, locked within the national closet,” asserts Afua Cooper. Ask many Canadians about the history of slavery in Canada and they will talk about the Underground Railroad. This is what many of us learned in school, that slavery existed in America, not in Canada, and that Canada’s heroic, romantic role …

Federally Funded Slaving, Rafael I. Pardo

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article presents a new frame of reference for thinking about the federal government’s complicity in supporting the domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States. While scholars have accounted for several methods of such support, they have failed to consider how federal bankruptcy legislation during the 1840s functionally created a system of direct financial grants to slave traders in the form of debt discharges. Relying on a variety of primary sources, including manuscript court records that have not been systematically analyzed by any published scholarship, this Article shows how the Bankruptcy Act of 1841 enabled severely indebted slave traders …

Passive Voter Suppression: Campaign Mobilization And The Effective Disfranchisement Of The Poor, Bertrall L. Ross Ii, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

A recent spate of election laws tightened registration rules, reduced convenient voting opportunities, and required voters to show specific types of identification in order to vote. Because these laws make voting more difficult, critics have analogized them to Jim Crow Era voter suppression laws.

We challenge the analogy that current restrictive voting laws are a reincarnation of Jim Crow Era voter suppression. While there are some notable similarities, the analogy obscures a more apt comparison to a different form of voter suppression-one that operates to effectively disfranchise an entire class of people, just as the old form did for African …

The Brandeis Thought Experiment: Reflection On The Elimination Of Racial Bias In The Legal System, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

This essay prompts the reader to engage in a thought experiment and consider their own limits in advancing the cause of; a legal system free from racism and bias, and lawyers are encouraged to use the experience of a young Louis Brandeis as a guide in this self-reflection. Specifically, this essay calls attention to the fact that Louis Brandeis started his legal career, at the same time when, and in the same place where thousands of African Americans were escaping persecution and traveling in search of economic and political freedom, yet he was publicly absent on issues of race. As …

We Still Have Not Learned From Anita Hill's Testimony, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty-seven years after Anita Hill testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her, and as Christine Blasey Ford prepares to testify that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, we still have not learned our mistakes from that mess in 1991.

Most people recognized that it looked bad, a black woman fending for herself in front of a group of white men. Yet we can’t acknowledge the central tragedy of 1991 – the false tension between feminist and antiracist movements.

We are still ignoring the unique vulnerability of black women.

The Birth Of A Nation: A Study Of Slavery In Seventeenth-Century Virginia, Randolph M. Mclaughlin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Race based slavery in North America had its origins in seventeenth-century Virginia. Initially, the position of the African worker was similar to that of the indentured servants from England. During the early to mid-seventeenth century, both African and English indentured servants served for a period of years and received the protections to which a servant was entitled. However, during the 1640s there appeared examples of Africans also being held as slaves. Thus, during the seventeenth century there existed a dual system of servitude or bondage for the African worker. One basis for this duality was the common law practice that …

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.

After Suffrage: The Unfinished Business Of Feminist Legal Advocacy, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay considers post-suffrage women’s citizenship through the eyes of Pauli Murray, a key figure at the intersection of the twentieth-century movements for racial justice and feminism. Murray drew critical lessons from the woman suffrage movement and the Reconstruction-era disintegration of an abolitionist-feminist alliance to craft legal and constitutional strategies that continue to shape equality law and advocacy today. Murray placed African American women at the center of a vision of universal human rights that relied upon interracial and intergenerational alliances and anticipated what scholars later named intersectionality. As Murray foresaw, women of color formed a feminist vanguard in the …

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 …