Digital Commons Network^™

Movement Judges, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

Judges matter. The opinions of a few impact the lives of many. Judges romanticize their own impartiality, but apathy in the face of systems of oppression favors the status quo and clears the way for conservative agendas to take root. The lifetime appointments of federal judges, the deliberate weaponization of the bench by reactionary opponents of the New Deal and progressive social movements, and the sheer inertia of judicial self-restraint have led to the conservative capture of the courts. By contrast, empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden renders substantive justice possible and leaves room for unsuccessful litigants to accept unfavorable …

The New Jim And Jane Crow Intersect: Challenges To Defending The Parental Rights Of Mothers During Incarceration, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Family law scholars and advocates have expressed the importance of providing counsel to parents in the family regulation system, especially parents who are incarcerated, because of the system’s complexities. This article establishes, however, that when mothers must navigate both the family regulation and criminal legal systems, the protections appointed parents’ counsel are supposed to provide are weakened. These harms are heightened especially for Black mothers within the carceral state. As this article shows, appointed lawyers in family regulation cases cannot properly protect the due process rights of mothers who are incarcerated because of the added challenges both mothers and their …

Movement Constitutionalism, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

The white supremacy at the heart of the American criminal legal system works to control Black, Brown, and poor people through mass incarceration. Poverty and incarceration act in a vicious circle, with reactionaries mounting a desperate defense against any attempt to mitigate economic exploitation or carceral violence. Ending the cycle will require replacing this inequitable system with the life- and liberty-affirming institutions of abolition democracy. The path to abolition democracy is arduous, but abolitionists can press for change through what I coin “movement constitutionalism.” Movement constitutionalism is the process by which grassroots abolitionist movements shift—through demands and in solidarity with …

Black Women And Voter Suppression, Carla Laroche

Scholarly Articles

Black women who are eligible to vote do so at consistently high rates during elections in the United States. For thousands of Black women, however, racism, sexism, and criminal convictions intersect to require them to navigate a maze of laws and policies that keep them from voting. With the alarming rate of convictions and incarceration of Black women, criminal law intersects with civil rights to bar their involvement in the electoral process. This voting ban is known as felony disenfranchisement, but it amounts to voter suppression.

By reconceptualizing voter suppression based on criminal convictions through the experiences of Black women’s …

The War On Drugs And Its Legal Effects On Black Americans, Alexia L. Howard-Mullins

2022 Symposium

The differences in treatment between Black and white Americans in the past fifty years has been a topic of thought in the minds of political and sociological scholars since the inception of the War on Drugs in 1971. These differences in treatment may lead to discrimination legally, resulting in longer prison sentences and a higher proportion of Black Americans in prison. This study analyzes the results of the War on Drugs that led to disproportionate imprisonment of Black Americans, including mandatory sentencing laws, drug classifications, and discrimination within law enforcement and the legal system. This study will use primary sources …

Recommendations To Address Race In Washington’S Juvenile Legal System: 2022 Recommendations To Criminal Justice Stakeholders In Washington, Task Force 2.0: Race And The Criminal Justice System

Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

Recommendations to Address Race in Washington’s Juvenile Legal System: 2022 Recommendations to Criminal Justice Stakeholders in Washington

Reclaiming Safety: Participatory Research, Community Perspectives, And Possibilities For Transformation, Janet Moore

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This paper offers the first known interdisciplinary, community-based participatory research study to focus directly on two questions that have drawn increased attention in the wake of global protests over racialized police violence: 1) What is the definition of safety? and 2) How can safety be made equally accessible to all? The study is part of a larger project that was co-designed by community members and academic researchers. The project aimed to strengthen local justice reform efforts by adding new data literacy skills to existing community-organizing capacity among Black residents of the Cincinnati, Ohio metropolitan area. Community-led roundtable discussions offered community …

A Taxonomy Of Silencing: The Law’S 100 Year Suppression Of The Tulsa Race Massacre, Suzette Malveaux

Scholarly Articles

Over one hundred years have passed since the 1921 brutal massacre of Tulsa’s African American community. This notorious attack came at the hands of a white mob and with the government’s blessing. With numerous centennial commemorations behind us, what has been learned? The answer to this question is crucial to preventing similar atrocities in the future.

One lesson is how important it is to tell the story—to honor the voices of those who lived through one of the most infamous government-sanctioned racial attacks in U.S. history. Knowledge is power.

Another lesson is how pernicious the law can be in silencing …

Reimagining Public Safety, Brandon Hasbrouck

Scholarly Articles

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, abolitionists were repeatedly asked to explain what they meant by “abolish the police”—the idea so seemingly foreign that its literal meaning evaded interviewers. The narrative rapidly turned to the abolitionists’ secondary proposals, as interviewers quickly jettisoned the idea of literally abolishing the police. What the incredulous journalists failed to see was that abolishing police and prisons is not aimed merely at eliminating the collateral consequences of other social ills. Abolitionists seek to build a society in which policing and incarceration are unnecessary. Rather than a society without a means of protecting public safety, …

Triaging Lomax: An Urgent Proposal For Legislative Reform To Restore Judicial Protection In American Prisons, Alexis B. Thurston

Duquesne Law Review

In a 2003 study of trends in inmate litigation before and after the enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act ("PLRA"), Harvard Law School Professor Margo Schlanger described the PLRA's administrative exhaustion requirement as "the statute's most damaging component."¹ Almost two decades later, in June of 2020, the United States Supreme Court indirectly strengthened the administrative exhaustion requirement through its ruling in Lomax v. Ortiz-Marquez.² In Lomax, the Court found that all dismissals of inmate litigation resulting from the failure of an incarcerated plaintiff to adhere to the exhaustion requirement would count as "strikes" against the …

Liberty And Just [Compensation] For All: Wrongful Conviction As A Fifth Amendment Taking, Kelly Shea Delvac

Connecticut Law Review

In the United States, over 2,900 people have been exonerated for crimes they did not commit. While some exonerees currently qualify for compensation for their wrongful convictions, less than 40% have received any type of financial support. This Note examines the history of wrongful convictions in America as well as the historical background of the Fifth Amendment. It then looks at the current compensation schemes available to exonerees and analyzes the evolution of takings jurisprudence. This Note argues that a wrongful conviction is a taking of an exoneree’s labor under the Fifth Amendment and, therefore, constitutionally entitles an exoneree to …

Reparations For Racial Wealth Disparities As Remedy For Social Contract Breach, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

Acute crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial meltdown exposed and exacerbated chronic racial wealth disparities. Those disparities accumulated over time as government and private actions—often involving contracts—systemically benefitted White Americans and institutions at the expense of African-Americans. This essay focuses on a private law mechanism—loan contracts—as one important contributor to systemic racial wealth disparities, labels particular lending contracts and related government action as breaches of the social contract, and proposes a restitution-based form of reparations as a remedy for that breach.

Repairing Our System Of Constitutional Accountability: Reflections On The 150th Anniversary Of Section 1983, David H. Gans

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

Section 1983 is a landmark statute that provides the foundation for holding state and local governments and their agents accountable when they violate constitutional rights. Unfortunately, rather than enforce the statute’s text and ensure the accountability that its drafters passed it to achieve, the Supreme Court has created four interlocking doctrines that squelch its promise of accountability: qualified immunity, absolute immunity, strict limits on local governmental liability, and the exclusion of states from Section 1983. This Article, written to mark the 150th anniversary of Section 1983, does a deep dive into the text and history of Section 1983 and recovers …

The Use And Abuse Of Domestic National Security Detention, Nicole Hallett

Seattle University Law Review

Are people convicted of terrorism-related offenses so dangerous that we must bend the Constitution to keep the public safe? Or should we treat them like people who commit other crimes—by prosecuting, convicting, sentencing, and then releasing them after they have served their criminal sentences? Can we trust the government to use the power to detain people without criminal charge without abusing it? The case of Adham Amin Hassoun raises these questions. Prosecuted after 9/11 for providing support to Muslims abroad in the 1990s, and sentenced under the United States’ expansive material support laws, Hassoun avoided a life sentence only to …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

America To Me – A Public Nuisance Reparations Framework Through The Lens Of The Tulsa Massacre, 55 Uic L. Rev. 681 (2022), Kerri Gefeke

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

On Proper[Ty] Apologies And Resilience Gaps, Marc L. Roark

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Moving From Harm Mitigation To Affirmative Discrimination Mitigation: The Untapped Potential Of Artificial Intelligence To Fight School Segregation And Other Forms Of Racial Discrimination, Andrew Gall

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Social Justice As Desistance: Rethinking Approaches To Gender Violence, Deborah M. Weissman

American University Law Review

Scholars and activists have directed increasing attention to the failure of the U.S. criminal legal system and the institutions of mass incarceration it has wrought and have identified the need for transformative changes in approaches to acts of harmful behaviors. Proponents of reforms have advocated for legal corrections to constrain sentencing practices, and remedy racial disparities in imprisonment to mitigate rates of incarceration and related punishments. COVID-19 release campaigns have revealed both the egregious conditions of prisons and the irrationality of punishment paradigms. Indeed, not a few abolitionists have repudiated the criminal legal system.

Released, But Not Free: The Unexonerated, Heidi Gilchrist

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Addressing The Inevitability Of Race In The Doj’S Enforcement Of The Pattern-Or-Practice Initiative, Joshua Chanin

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Section 14141 of the 1994 Crime Act empowers the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and drive reform of local law enforcement agencies found to have engaged in a pattern or practice of misconduct. During the Trump administration, the DOJ willfully allowed its powers under this section to lie dormant, despite a number of high-profile incidents of police violence against Black Americans. Active enforcement of Section 14141 affords the federal executive branch significant opportunities to promote lawful policing. Using its pattern-or-practice authority, the DOJ has guided dozens of law enforcement agencies through a process designed to remedy systemic unlawful …

Senseless Sentencing: The Uneven Application Of The Career Offender Guidelines, Christopher Ethan Watts

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Federal appellate courts are currently split on the definition of “controlled substance” in the career offender guideline, with one side using federal law to define the phrase, and the other side allowing standalone state law offenses to trigger the guideline. Allowing state law to define the phrase allows countless substances Congress never intended to penalize to be able to trigger one of the most severe penalties in the Sentencing Guidelines. This Note assesses the landscape of the circuit split and analyzes the arguments for and against federally defining “controlled substance offense.” This Note then proposes a novel way to resolve …

As Fires Blaze Through California, Could They Blaze A New Path For Incarcerated Individuals: A Model For Back-End Abolition, Jacquelyn Kelsey Arnold

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

This Note provides a critique on the current system of prison labor through the lens of the California wildfires and the lack of inmate labor due to early release in the wake of COVID-19. This Note provides an overview of the relevant history of the Thirteenth Amendment, contextualizes mass incarceration as a product of the “War on Drugs” in the United States, and consequently, discusses the significant and dramatic expansion of the prison industrial complex and the use of prison labor as a growing source of production labor. It concludes with a recommendation for a provisional back-end abolition model that …

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

Law 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 …

Critical Tax Theory: Combatting Racial And Income Inequality In America, Anthony Rychkov

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Visibility Trap, Kate Redburn

Faculty Scholarship

Vice Patrol offers a novel history of the visibility trap. It integrates interventions in legal history, history of sexuality, and queer theory with remarkable ease. Lvovsky brings new insight to a question that has puzzled scholars across several fields: Why and how does cultural representation lead to increased state repression? Blending impressive archival research with sophisticated theoretical analysis, Lvovsky follows cultural knowledge into the legal system to offer a fresh diagnosis of the problem and how it develops. In her discovery of “epistemic gaps,” she uncovers a key mechanism of the visibility trap. Disagreements between the police and the courts, …

Dispensing Reparations For Marijuana Convictions, Michelle Mazzola

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Practicing With Conviction: Race, Reentry, And The Legal Profession, Nicole Smith Futrell

Faculty Scholarship

Within recent years, different areas of the legal community have publicly addressed the need for racial justice. The killing of George Floyd and the reckoning with race that followed prompted law schools, bar associations, and court systems, as well as government, private, and non-profit legal organizations, to publicly acknowledge that racial disparities continue to persist in our society. While most of these legal institutions have made some recognition of the fact that the legal system has played a role in perpetuating systemic racism, they have essentially failed to address how discrimination against system-impacted individuals continues to deepen racial and socioeconomic …

Title Ix Abroad: A Proposed Framework For Extraterritorial Application, Christina Vieira Da Rosa

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Regulatory changes to Title IX made clear that the statute’s sexual assault grievance procedures do not apply to incidents that take place outside the United States. This Comment explores the reasoning underlying these 2020 regulations, which signal a departure from prior interpretations of Title IX and limit recourse for U.S. students who are sexually assaulted while studying abroad. Ultimately, this Comment argues that Title IX should have an extraterritorial reach when both complainant and respondent are affiliated with U.S. institutions. Such a change would harmonize Title IX’s underlying purpose with the practical difficulties of investigating and adjudicating conduct occurring outside …

Set Up To Fail: Youth Probation Conditions As A Driver Of Incarceration, Jyoti Nanda

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Youth probation is the most common form of punishment for youth in the United States criminal legal system, with nearly a quarter of a million youth currently under supervision. Yet the role youth probation conditions play in the incarceration of youth has not been the focus of legal scholarship. Youth probation is a court-imposed intervention where young people remain at home under the supervision of a youth probation officer and are required to adhere to probation conditions, rules, and court-ordered conditions. The orders rely on standardized terms on youth probation condition forms. This is the first scholarly Article to excavate …