Digital Commons Network^™

The Cocaine Vaccine, Dru Stevenson

ExpressO

The controversial new cocaine vaccine (TA-CD) has the potential to be an extremely effective treatment tool for recovering addicts, but it also presents opportunities for non-therapeutic uses, such as preventing cocaine use in the first place. It is foreseeable that the cocaine vaccine could become a condition of parole or probation, or receiving welfare payments, or for employment in certain occupations. Universal vaccination is also a possibility but less likely for political reasons. This article investigates each of these areas of potential use. Any setting where mandatory drug testing is currently in place could become a venue for the vaccination. …

A Time To Lose, D. P. Marshall Jr.

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Lessons From And For "Disabled" Students, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

The traditional understanding of "disabled" means to have a physical, mental, or emotional limitation. It is unfortunate that the word has negative connotations because we all have the ability to do some things and not others. An individual's disabilities, traditional or otherwise, do not diminish the person or detract from the universal tenet that all people are inherently equal and entitled to be treated with dignity. Generally, it is unproductive to compare the circumstances of one group with another for the purpose of discerning which group has it better or worse. Struggles by different groups to achieve equality have different …

Give Them Their Due: An African-American Reparations Program Based On The Native American Federal Aid Model, Mishael A. Danielson, Alexis Pimentel

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Interpretation And Coercive Interrogation After Chavez V. Martinez, John T. Parry

ExpressO

Using the Supreme Court's decision last Term in Chavez v. Martinez as a launching pad, this article reveals and addresses fundamental tensions in constitutional interpretation, the law of interrogation, and civil rights litigation. First, this article highlights the importance of remedies to the definition of constitutional rights, which compels us to jettison the idea of prophylactic rules and accept Congress's role in constitutional interpretation. Armed with these insights, the article next considers the law of coercive interrogation. I explain why the privilege against self-incrimination is more than a trial right, and I redefine the central holding of Miranda to take …

A Custodial Suspect's Right To The Assistance Of Counsel – The Ambivalence Of Israeli Law Against The Background Of American Law, Rinat Kitai

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

Racial Profiling Of African-American Males: Stopped, Searched, And Stripped Of Constitutional Protection, 38 J. Marshall L. Rev. 439 (2004), Floyd D. Weatherspoon

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Central Park Five, The Scottsboro Boys, And The Myth Of The Bestial Black Man, N. Jeremi Duru

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Restored To Health To Be Put To Death: Reconciling The Legal And Ethical Dilemmas Of Medication To Execute In Singleton V. Norris, Kursten Hensl

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Is There A Place For Race As A Legal Concept, Sharona Hoffman

Faculty Publications

What does "race" mean? The word "race" is omnipresent in American social, political, and legal discourse. The concept of "race" is central to contemporary debate about affirmative action, racial profiling, hate crimes, health inequities, and many other issues. Nevertheless, the best research in genetics, medicine, and the social sciences reveals that the concept of "race" is elusive and has no reliable definition.

This article argues that "race" is an unnecessary and potentially pernicious concept. As evidenced by the history of slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, and other human tragedies, the idea of "race" can perpetuate prejudices and misconceptions and serve as …

American Public Schools Fifty Years After Brown: A Separate And Unequal Reality, Sheryll Cashin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Public schools became more segregated in the 1990s. More so than our neighborhoods, our schools are bastions of race and class privilege on the one hand, and race and class disadvantage on the other. Black and Latino schoolchildren are bearing the heaviest costs of this separation. They tend to be relegated to high-poverty; overwhelmingly minority schools that are characterized by poorer test scores, less experienced teachers, and fewer resources than the type of public schools most white children attend. This Essay argues that public schooling has become the "great equalizer" in America because it tends to place white children in …

The Political Delinquent: Crime, Deviance, And Resistance In Black America, Trevor George Gardner

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article is largely an argument that the pervasive sense of cultural resistance in the African American community must be considered by criminal theorists as, at least, a partial explanation of “criminality” within the African American community. Woven into the fabric of African American culture is a vital oppositional element. This element, spoken of in many circles as “oppositional culture” constitutes a bold and calculated rejection of destructive mainstream values that have perpetuated social inequalities and power imbalances. African American resistance culture is captured by novelist John Edgar Wideman in his account of his brother ’s criminal lifestyle and the …

Upending Status: A Comment On Switching, Inequality, And The Idea Of The Reasonable Person, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article reviews Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom, by Cynthia Lee (2003).

Cynthia Lee has written a hard-hitting and insightful book on bias and the law of homicide. Her purpose is to document how murder law’s “reasonable person” may absorb the unreason of prejudice in its various forms (from biases of race to gender to sexual orientation). Doctrinally, Lee’s book is wide-ranging and ambitious, covering a variety of standard defenses, such as provocation (chs. 1–3) and self-defense (chs. 5–7), in contexts ranging from excessive use of force to intimate homicide, from hate …

Just Do It, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Racial injustice has always been a problem in the United States. The most salient victims of the Nation's discrimination against racial minorities have included indigenous Indians, Chinese immigrants, Japanese-American citizens, Latinos, and of course blacks. But as the current war on terrorism illustrates, under the right conditions, almost any racial group can come within the scope of America's discriminatory focus. It is common to suppose that that there is a difference between the progressive and the conservative ends of the political spectrum concerning the issue of race. However, those commonly accepted differences pale in comparison to the overriding similarity that …

Business As Usual? Brown And The Continuing Conundrum Of Race In America, Robert S. Chang, Jerome M. Culp Jr.

Faculty Articles

In this article, Professors Robert Chang and Jerome Culp examine the state of race in America in the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, focusing on the ten-year window preceding its fiftieth anniversary. Their findings reveal that while Brown established fundamental precedent in the area of race relations, racial inequality remains entrenched in a number of modern social institutions. Chang and Culp analyze this dilemma by focusing on three distinct trends. First, a cycle of inequality is driven by racial disparities in wealth and perpetuated by interlocking systems of education, housing, family, healthcare, …

Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique Of The Economics, Civil Liberties, And Constitutional Literature, And Of Criminal Profiling More Generally, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

New reporting requirements and data collection efforts by over four hundred law enforcement agencies across the country – including entire states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Washington – are producing a continuous flow of new evidence on highway police searches. For the most part, the data consistently show disproportionate searches of African-American and Hispanic motorists in relation to their estimated representation on the road. Economists, civil liberties advocates, legal and constitutional scholars, political scientists, lawyers, and judges are poring over the new data and reaching, in many cases, quite opposite conclusions about racial profiling.

Introduction, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

Brown v. Board of Education [1] is the seminal case of the Twentieth Century. Mere mention of the case can start discussion on any number of topics, all important and all that relate to, or were importantly affected by, Brown. Some of those discussions relate to the immediate subject of Brown: Was state-imposed racially segregated public education a violation of the Equal Protection Clause? What is the nature of race relations in America? How close are we to achieving a racially just society? How fair is our system of public education? Others might focus on Brown for its impact on …

The Legally Queer Child, Bruce Macdougall

All Faculty Publications

This article explores the various presumptions and arguments of Canadian courts in largely denying queer children a legal presence. An analysis of the intersection of homosexuality and children is explored with a view to arguing that legally, queer children deserve a voice. The author begins by outlining the development of the legal conceptualization of the "child". This conceptualization led to the notion of the child as innocent, and thus in need of protection. In comparison, homosexuals came to be characterized as "aberrant" and "predatory". Protecting children from homosexuals then became a simple step of logic, which ultimately led to the …

Equal Justice Under The Law: Why Iolta Programs Do Not Violate The First Amendment, Hillary A. Webber

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Racism As "The Nation's Crucial Sin": Theology And Derrick Bell , George H. Taylor

ExpressO

The Article probes a paradox that lies at the heart of the work of critical race scholar Derrick Bell. Bell claims on the one hand that racism is permanent, and yet on the other he argues that the fight against racism is both necessary and meaningful. Although Bell’s thesis of racism’s permanence has been criticized for rendering action for racial justice unavailing, the Article advances an understanding of Bell that supports and defends the integrity of his paradox. The Article draws upon the work of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and Niebuhr’s paradox that social action is both necessary and meaningful …

Canadian Fundamental Justice And American Due Process: Two Models For A Guarantee Of Basic Adjudicative Fairness, David M. Siegel

ExpressO

This paper traces how the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States have each used the basic guarantee of adjudicative fairness in their respective constitutions to effect revolutions in their countries’ criminal justice systems, through two different jurisprudential models for this development. It identifies a relationship between two core constitutional structures, the basic guarantee and enumerated rights, and shows how this relationship can affect the degree to which entrenched constitutional rights actually protect individuals. It explains that the different models for the relationship between the basic guarantee and enumerated rights adopted in Canada and the United States, an “expansive …

Democracy Frozen In Devonian Amber: The Racial Impact Of Permanent Felon Disenfranchisement In Florida, Carlos M. Portugal

University of Miami Law Review

No abstract provided.

First Amendment Equal Protection: On Discretion, Inequality, And Participation, Daniel P. Tokaji

Michigan Law Review

The tension between equality and discretion lies at the heart of some of the most vexing questions of constitutional law. The considerable discretion that many official decisionmakers wield raises the spectre that violations of equality norms will sometimes escape detection. This is true in a variety of settings, whether discretion lies over speakers' access to public fora, implementation of the death penalty, or the recounting of votes. Is the First Amendment violated, for example, when a city ordinance gives local officials broad discretion to determine the conditions under which political demonstrations may take place? Is equal protection denied where the …

The Scottsboro Trials: A Legal Lynching (Part Ii), Faust Rossi

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Civil Liberties In An Age Of Counterterrorism, Conor Gearty

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article examines the historical origins of civil liberties and shows their importance to systems of government rooted in the principles of representative democracy. It argues that the subject of civil liberties needs to be distinguished from issues related to criminal justice and human rights, and that too broad a deployment of the language of civil liberties can lead to the importance of civil liberties being underappreciated by the wider public. The article considers how the integrity of the language of civil liberties and the representative system of democracy as a whole can be preserved in the face of the …

No Exit: Racial Profiling And Canada's War Against Terrorism, Reem Bahdi

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

After September 11, 2001, some scholars and policy-makers promoted the racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims as a means towards greater national security. While racial profiling has not been officially sanctioned in Canada, it attracts popular support and undeniably takes place. The first part of this article identifies three different categories of racial profiling in the context of Canada's War against Terrorism. The second part identifies the problems associated with racial profiling. It argues that racial profiling undermines national security while also heightening the vulnerability and exclusion of Arabs, Muslims, and other racialized groups in Canada.

Civil Disobedience And The Law: The Role Of Legal Professionals, James Macpherson

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Discusses the role of judges when cases of civil disobedience are brought before the court.

No African-American Lawyers Allowed: The Inefficient Racism Of The Aba's Accreditation Of Law Schools, George B. Shepherd

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Students Have Rights, Too: The Drafting Of Student Conduct Codes, Jason J. Bach

Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal

No abstract provided.

White Interests And Civil Rights Realism: Rodrigo's Bittersweet Epiphany, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

I had just settled down, taken off my tie, and was about to go over the two-page handout entitled "Information for Wedding Parties " that the minister of the small church had handed me minutes earlier, when I heard a knock and familiar voice from the other side of the anteroom door.