Law and Race Commons^™

Debunking The Myth That Police Body Cams Are Civil Rights Tool, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Do The Safeguards In The Victorian Assisted-Dying Legislation Adequately Account For The Experiences Of Other Nations?, Heath Harley-Bellemore

Theses

In 2017 the Victorian State Parliament passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017, making it the first Australian jurisdiction since 1996 to pass assisted dying legislation. The Victorian model was hailed by the Government of Victoria as the ‘safest and most conservative in the world’, and had the benefit of drawing on over 20 years of voluntary assisted dying experiences of other jurisdictions for its development. This thesis examines the experiences of other jurisdictions and how they informed the development of the Victorian model. It examines available data, reports, and criticisms of international experiences and applies them to the Victorian …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreward

Keynote Address, Justin Hansford

Seattle University Law Review

Keynote Address by Justin Hansford

Hernández V. Mesa: A Case For A More Meaningful Partnership With The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, Peyton Jacobsen

Seattle University Law Review

Through an in-depth examination of Hernández, the Inter-American Human Rights System, and the success of Mexico’s partnership with said system, this Note will make a case for embracing human rights bodies— specifically, the Inter-American System on Human Rights—as an appropriate and necessary check on the structures that form the United States government. Part I will look closely at the reasoning and judicially created doctrine that guided the decision in Hernández, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the complicated path through the courts that led to a seemingly straightforward yet unsatisfying result. Part II will illustrate the scope …

Race And Washington’S Criminal Justice System 2021: Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0 Research Working Group

Seattle University Law Review

This report is an update on the 2011 Preliminary Report on Race and Washington’s Criminal Justice System. This update does not include as context the history of race discrimination in Washington, and readers are encouraged to view the 2011 report for its brief historical overview.14 The 2011 report began with that historical overview because the criminal justice system does not exist in a vacuum. Instead, it exists as part of a legal system that for decades actively managed and controlled where people could live, work, recreate, and even be buried.

Members of communities impacted by race disproportionality in Washington’s criminal …

Race In Washington’S Juvenile Legal System: 2021 Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0 Juvenile Justice Subcommittee

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this report provides the core work of the subcommittee and is intended to function as a stand-alone document, expressed in youth- friendly language, that sets forth: (1) the youth-articulated goals for systemic change to the juvenile legal system; (2) a narrative of how the system currently works and the harms caused; and (3) the change needed to bring about the youth-articulated goals for systemic change. This document is intended to be a youth-centered blueprint for change—a tool for community advocates, a framework for policy makers, and a call-in to the many institutional actors to center the leadership …

Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being: Dismantling The Inequitable Intersections Among Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice, And Education, Kele Stewart

Articles

Twenty years after Shattered Bonds, Dorothy Roberts' indictment that the family regulation system polices, disrupts, and restructures Black families and communities remains urgent. Black families remain overrepresented in foster care with enshrined disparate treatment and outcomes. Black children are more likely to be removed from their homes, and their longer stays in foster care are characterized by placement instability, overly restrictive placements, the risk of abuse and exploitation, and inadequate mental health and other services. Black children also have worse educational outcomes than even other children in foster care, are over-referred to the juvenile justice system, and are more …

Adaptive Rezoning For Social Equity, Affordability And Resilience, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I will show how the legacies of the institutional barriers to housing still persist to deprive many of the predicates for economic thriving and personal flourishing and how existing zoning philosophy cannot be justified by the need to protect health and safety. Righting the inequities of the past and of the present will require dismantling some of the institutions, apparently legitimate and well-meaning, but operating devilishly to create and perpetuate hardship and exclusion. This will require laying bare the institutions to reveal their ignoble essence. We need a radical overhaul of the historic zoning regime from one …

An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During The Covid-19 Crisis, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

In a typical year, New York City’s vast family regulation system, fueled by an army of mandated reporters, investigates tens of thousands of reports of child neglect and abuse, policing almost exclusively poor Black and Latinx families even as the government provides those families extremely limited support. When the City shut down in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this system shrunk in almost every conceivable way as mandated reporters retreated, caseworkers adopted less intrusive investigatory tactics, and family courts constrained their operations. The number of reports fell, the number of cases filed in court fell, and the number of …

Human Rights At The Ocean-Climate Nexus: Opening Doors For The Participation Of Indigenous Peoples, Children And Youth, And Gender Diversity, Unwana Udo, Tahnee Prior, Sara L. Seck

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

No abstract provided.

Gender And Intersectionality In Business And Human Rights Scholarship, Melisa N. Handl, Sara L. Seck, Penelope Simons

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article, we explore what intersectionality, as an analytic tool, can contribute to business and human rights (BHR) scholarship. To date, few BHR scholars have explicitly engaged in intersectional analysis. While gender analysis of BHR issues remains crucial to expose inequality in business activity, we argue that engagement with intersectionality can enrich and support this and other BHR scholarship. Intersectional approaches allow us to move beyond single-axis analysis, contest simplistic representations about gender issues and expose the complexity of human relations. It draws our attention to structures that sustain disadvantage such as racism, colonialism, social and economic marginalization and …

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, …

Toward A Socially Just Peace In The War On Drugs?: The Illinois Cannabis Social-Equity Program, Andre Douglas Pond Cummings, Steven A. Ramirez

Faculty Scholarship

Laudably, when Illinois legalized the recreational use of cannabis, it also sought to repair the damage wrought by the War on Drugs (WOD)through its social-equity initiatives. That harm included excessive and disproportionate incarceration in communities of color, over-policing within those communities, and all of the social and economic harms implicit in those realities. This harm necessarily creates intergenerational harm, as parents and children lose necessary pillars of support. Moreover, compelling evidence suggests that the progenitors of the WOD in-tended this harm. Measured against this historic social injustice, the social equity efforts in Illinois fail to secure a material unwinding of …

Criminal Law Exceptionalism, Benjamin Levin

Publications

For over half a century, U.S. prison populations have ballooned and criminal codes have expanded. In recent years, a growing awareness of mass incarceration and the harms of criminal law across lines of race and class has led to a backlash of anti-carceral commentary and social movement energy. Academics and activists have adopted a critical posture, offering not only small-bore reforms, but full-fledged arguments for the abolition of prisons, police, and criminal legal institutions. Where criminal law was once embraced by commentators as a catchall solution to social problems, increasingly it is being rejected, or at least questioned. Instead of …

Roadmap For Anti-Racism: First Unwind The War On Drugs Now, André Douglas Pond Cummings, Steven A. Ramirez

Faculty Scholarship

The War on Drugs (WOD) transmogrified into a war on communities of color early in its history, and its impact has devastated communities of color first and foremost. People of color disproportionately suffer incarceration in the WOD even though people of color use illegal narcotics at substantially lower rates than white Americans. As a result, the WOD led to mass incarceration of people of color at many times the rate of white Americans. Indeed, as a stark illustration of the power of race in America, even after Illinois and Colorado legalized cannabis, over-policing in communities of color resulted in a …

The Golem In The Machine: Ferpa, Dirty Data, And Digital Distortion In The Education Record, Najarian R. Peters

Washington and Lee Law Review

Like its counterpart in the criminal justice system, dirty data—data that is inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading—in K-12 education records creates and catalyzes catastrophic life events. The presence of this data in any record suggests a lack of data integrity. The systemic problem of dirty data in education records means the data stewards of those records have failed to meet the data integrity requirements embedded in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA was designed to protect students and their education records from the negative impact of erroneous information rendered from the “private scribblings” of educators. The legislative history …

Whiteness As Contract, Marissa Jackson Sow

Washington and Lee Law Review

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 …