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Full-Text Articles in Law
Reimagining Criminal Justice: The Disparate Impact Ofthe 'Castle' Doctrine, Carmen Wierenga
Reimagining Criminal Justice: The Disparate Impact Ofthe 'Castle' Doctrine, Carmen Wierenga
Reimagining Criminal Justice
On October 12, a mobile phone video showed a Black man being followed and harassed by a white man in Las Vegas. As the Black man is walking away, a voice on the recording says “why can’t you handle it like a … man?” The white man then throws a punch, and the Black man turns and shoots the white man. The white man survived, according to the sparse news coverage I found online. As of October 12, the shooter had not been found. The video spurred discussion, though: would the Black shooter succeed on a stand-your-ground claim? The answer …
Firearms Policy And The Black Community: An Assessment Of The Modern Orthodoxy, Nicholas J. Johnson
Firearms Policy And The Black Community: An Assessment Of The Modern Orthodoxy, Nicholas J. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
The heroes of the modern civil rights movement were more than just stoic victims of racist violence. Their history was one of defiance and fighting long before news cameras showed them attacked by dogs and fire hoses. When Fannie Lou Hamer revealed she kept a shotgun in every corner of her bedroom, she was channeling a century old practice. And when delta share cropper Hartman Turnbow, after a shootout with the Klan, said “I don’t figure I was being non-nonviolent, (yes non-nonviolent) I was just protecting my family”, he was invoking an evolved tradition that embraced self-defense and disdained political …
From Ballots To Bullets: District Of Columbia V. Heller And The New Civil Rights, Anders Walker
From Ballots To Bullets: District Of Columbia V. Heller And The New Civil Rights, Anders Walker
All Faculty Scholarship
This article posits that the Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment ruling District of Columbia v. Heller is a victory for civil rights, but not in the sense that most activists from the 1960s would recognize. Rather than a product of mid-century legal liberalism, Heller marks the culmination of almost forty years of coalition-based popular constitutionalism aimed at transforming the individual right to bear arms and the common law right to "employ deadly force in self-defense" into new civil rights. The implications of this are potentially great. By declaring the right to use deadly force in self-defense an "essential" right, the …