Digital Commons Network^™

Panel: Status, Progress, And Integration Of Lawyers Of Color In The Legal Profession, Sterling Johnson Jr., Zachary Carter, Teresita Alicea, Renée Landers, Jacqueline Berrien, Jacques C. Leroy

Western New England Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Age Of Unreason: The Impact Of Reasonableness, Increased Police Force, And Colorblindness On Terry "Stop And Frisk", Omar Saleem

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Race, Religion, And Cultural Identity: Reconciling The Jurisprudence Of Race And Religion, Tseming Yang

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Underfederalization Of Crime, A. Kimberley Dayton

Faculty Scholarship

This article contends that judicial and academic complaints about the overfederalization of crime largely have matters backwards. The image of a runaway national government increasingly taking away the enforcement of the criminal law from the States is essentially false. The available evidence indicates that the national government's share in the enforcement of criminal law has been actually diminishing for more than the last half century. The national government does have concurrent authority over a greater range of criminal activity now, including much violent street crime. But, contrary to Lopez and the conventional wisdom it embraces, this expanded authority does not …

Representing Black Male Innocence, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

This Article is a case study of a California capital case. Drawing on cultural studies, the first part develops the social construction of Black male gang member, especially as that identity is understood within white imaginations. The powerful and frightening idea of a Black man who is a gang member, even gang leader, captured the imagination and moral passion of the decisionmakers in this case, recasting and reframing the evidence in furtherance of this idea. In fundamental ways, this idea or imposed identity is fundamentally inconsistent with any American concept of innocence.

The second part uses the case to investigate …

Feminist Theory: Gender, Race And Recidivism, Amie M Shuck

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

Feminists and women of color have criticized criminological theories for being developed by white middle-class men to explain white male delinquency, and thus, are limited in their understanding of crime and deviance within a gender or racial context. The purpose of this study is to use a series of logistic regression models to evaluate this assertion regarding criminological 'theories' of recidivism. The results indicate that there are substantive differences in statistically significant coefficients, models explanatory power, and percent improvement in models ability to correctly classify recidivists between gender, race and gender/race models. These findings suggest that further research should be …

Race And Criminal Justice, Richard B. Collins

Publications

No abstract provided.

Rape, Race, And Representation: The Power Of Discourse, Discourses Of Power, And The Reconstruction Of Heterosexuality, Elizabeth M. Iglesias

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article explores some of the difficulties involved in designing genuinely effective and broadly inclusive legal strategies for eliminating women's sexual oppression. Part II.A begins the analysis by using Gary LaFree's empirical studies of rape enforcement practices to develop some observations about the kinds of legal strategies most likely to foster women's sexual autonomy.' LaFree's studies illustrate how the institutional structures and decision making procedures of the criminal justice system create the opportunity for rape processing practices to reproduce relations of race and gender subordination. Each discretionary decision point in the system creates a social space in which legal agents …

Disproportionate Detention Of Minorities: A Case Study Of One State's Compliance With The Mandates Of The Juvenile Justice And Delinquency Prevention Act, N. E. Schafer, Richard W. Curtis

Conference papers

Pursuant to Section 223(a)(23) of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, states must examine whether minority youth are disproportionately detained in relation to their proportion in the general population. For a preliminary assessment of Alaska’s compliance, five and a half years of detention data (1990–June 1995) for the state of Alaska are analyzed to assess the detention of minority and non-minority youth. A number of factors are used to compare racial groups: type of offense, prior record, gender, age, length of detention, etc.

Crime And Punishment: Benign Neglect Of Racism In The Criminal Justice System, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article is a literary review and analysis of Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America by Michael Tonry (1995). Part I of this review describes Tonry's analysis of the crime policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Part II discusses Tonry's indictment of the War on Drugs and criticizes his failure to acknowledge the effects of discriminatory prosecutorial practices and sentencing laws. Part III critiques Tonry's trivialization of the significance of race discrimination in the criminal justice system more generally. Part IV summarizes Tonry's proposals for change and stresses the importance of documenting, examining, and eliminating racial bias …

Race-Ing Legal Ethics, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Introduction: O.J. Simpson And The Criminal Justice System On Trial, Christopher B. Mueller

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Color Of Money, Paul F. Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Death Penalty In The Twenty-First Century , Stephen B. Bright, Edward Chikofsky, Laurie Ekstrand, Harriet C. Ganson, Paul D. Kamenar, Robert E. Morin, William G. Otis, Jasmin Raskin, Ira P. Robbins, Diann Rust-Tierney, Charles F. Shilling, Andrew L. Sooner, Ronald J. Rabak, David V. Drehle, James Wootton

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Death Penalty In The Twenty-First Century , Stephen B. Bright, Edward Chikofsky, Laurie Ekstrand, Harriet C. Ganson, Paul D. Kamenar, Robert E. Morin, William G. Otis, Jasmin Raskin, Ira P. Robbins, Diann Rust-Tierney, Charles F. Shilling, Andrew L. Sooner, Ronald J. Rabak, David V. Drehle, James Wootton

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

We Can't Go On Together With Suspicious Minds: Judicial Bias And Racialized Perspective In R. V. R.D.S., Richard F. Devlin

Dalhousie Law Journal

In recent years it has been recognized that the Canadian judiciary has been drawn from only a relatively small cross section of the community, specifically privileged white males. As a result there have been calls for, and some action in pursuit of, appointment processes that are designed to diversify the bench in order to render it more inclusive. Gender and race are the two primary categories that are invoked as the benchmarks of diversity. While it would appear that numerically there seems to be some very modest progress towards the goal of achieving a more inclusive judiciary, significant qualitative, institutional …

Shaw V. Reno: A Mirage Of Good Intentions With Devastating Racial Consquences, A Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Gregory A. Clarick, Marcella David

Fordham Law Review

In this Article the authors critically examine the Supreme Court's recent decision in Shaw v. Reno, which held that a North Carolina minority-majority voting district of "dramatically irregular" shape is subject to strict scrutiny, absent sufficient race-neutral explanations for its boundaries. While the authors assert that such race-conscious redistricting will meet the burdens of strict-scrutiny, given the peculiar history of the southern states, they here argue that Shaw is fundamentally flawed. They examine the history of political racism in North Carolina leading up to the 1991 redistricting plan. They then examine the Court's misguided presumptions that race-conscious districting plans are …

Rights Held Hostage: Race, Ideology And The Peremptory Challenge, Kenneth B. Nunn

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article addresses the Supreme Court's application of the Equal Protection Clause to the selection of juries in criminal trials. Focusing on Black-white relations, it takes the position that efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in jury selection are successful only to the extent that they also eliminate the result of the discrimination- racial subjugation of Blacks through the criminal justice process. By this measure, the Supreme Court's recent jury selection cases are an abject failure.

Edmonson V. Leesville Concrete Co.: Reasoned Or Result Oriented Jurisprudence?, Frederick V. Olson

Northern Illinois University Law Review

This note examines the United States Supreme Court decision finding a private litigant's use of peremptory challenges to exclude jurors on account of race in a civil case constituted "state action" and violated the excluded jurors' equal protection rights. The author examines the Court's decision and concludes that the finding of "state action" was not based on reasoned jurisprudence.

Peremptory Jury Strike In Texas After Batson And Edmondson., Alan B. Rich

St. Mary's Law Journal

In Batson v. Kentucky, the United States Supreme Court overruled that portion of Swain v. Alabama, which had imposed a “crippling burden of proof” upon a person who wished to vindicate his right of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment in the face of a racially motivated peremptory challenge. Under Batson, a defendant can raise an inference of discrimination and prove it using only evidence adduced at his own trial. Two fundamental questions needing resolution prior to involving the Batson procedures are: (A) who has standing to bring a Batson challenge; and (B) who must be challenged before the Batson …

Crime, Drugs, And Race, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

The crime and criminal record statistics of black Americans are frightening; and they keep getting worse. These figures, of course, give us pause. Yet, it must be kept in mind that none of these figures demonstrates that blacks as a race are more prone to crime. Rather, the figures show that the average black person in the United States is more likely than the average white person to be so situated in the social structure that he or she is more likely to be involved in crime, with an even higher likelihood of being arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.

Book Review: The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, And Public Policy By William Julius Wilson, James Jennings

Trotter Review

William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged represents the debate of the last 10 to 20 years about race, poverty, and public policy. Part of Wilson’s rationale for the book is the belief that conservative policy analysts and ideologues have gained the upper hand in presenting their case about black urban poverty. He hopes to provide a framework of liberal analysis that will allow a better understanding of the causes of the intensifying black poverty.

Mccleskey V. Kemp: The Shadow Of Racism On The Capital Sentencing Process, Regina M. Harris

Northern Illinois University Law Review

This Note discusses the United States Supreme Court decision refusing to infer abuse of prosecutorial discretion in a specific case from a statistical study showing that defendant's whose victims were white are over 4 times more likely to receive a death sentence in the State of Georgia than defendants whose victims were black. This Note concludes that detailed record-keeping by prosecutors in potential capital sentence cases is essential to curbing unevenly-imposed death sentencing.

Batson V. Kentucky: Curing The Disease But Killing The Patient, William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.

Extra-Legal Factors In The American Legal System, Peter W. Mayer

Honors Papers

The laws of the United States have been written over time with the intention of providing a framework for fair, legitimate, and uniform legal decisions to be made. Laws attempt to provide national tranquility by providing channels of punishment for those who disobey them. At the same time laws in the United States attempt to avoid any conflict with differing cultural values present in our nation. The laws of the United States are intended to function without regard to the race, sex, or religion of the defendant, complainant, or attorneys involved. Laws themselves cannot help but embody the cultural values …

Potentially Discriminatory Criminal Justice Agency Policies, John E. Angell

Reports

This report describes potential sources of discrimination in the Alaska criminal justice system related to agency policies and procedures. The study relied on policy and procedural manuals and other written materials describing operational practices and organizational and management information about criminal justice operations. The report identifies policy areas in law enforcement, the legal and judicial system , corrections, and systemwide which provide the highest potential for discrimination on the basis of race, sex, economic condition, or other characteristics.

Foreword, James W. Ely, Terry Calvani

Vanderbilt Law Review

In the hope of giving some direction for a regional approach to the legal past of the South, Vanderbilt Law School, with the generous assistance of the University Research Council, sponsored a two-day Symposium on this important topic in the spring of 1978 and invited leading scholars to participate. Principal papers by Richard Maxwell Brown, Maxwell H. Bloomfield, Robert M. Ireland, A. E. Keir Nash, and Robert J. Haws and Michael V. Namorato discussed diverse aspects of southern legal history.