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Full-Text Articles in Law

Amending A Racist Constitution, William J. Aceves Jan 2021

Amending A Racist Constitution, William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

Ours is a racist Constitution. Despite its soaring language, it was founded on slavery and a commitment to racial inequality. This vision is etched in the constitutional text, from the notorious Three-Fifths Clause to the equally repugnant Fugitive Slave Clause. And despite the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, the Constitution retains these vestiges of slavery in its fabric. After 230 years, it is time to remove these troubling provisions from the Constitution. This Essay offers a radical departure from prior constitutional practice. Instead of appending yet another amendment that would simply require readers to ignore the offending language, this …


Desnatada: Latina Illumination Of Breastfeeding, Race, And Injustice, Jasmine Gonzales Rose Oct 2020

Desnatada: Latina Illumination Of Breastfeeding, Race, And Injustice, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

In Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Andrea Freeman brilliantly explains how racism results in lower breastfeeding rates by Black mothers,1 which in turn results in poorer health outcomes--including higher mortality rates--for Black babies.2 She provides four primary reasons for this phenomenon: (1) the history and legacy of slavery, (2) the imposition of racist gender stereotypes on Black women, (3) racially-targeted formula promotion by manufacturers and hospitals, and (4) government benefits and employment policies that obstruct poor people's ability to breastfeed. The first two of these reasons are particularly devastating: the legacy of slavery and misogynoiristic3 stereotypes …


Why Reparations To African Descendants In The United States Are Essential To Democracy, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro Jan 2011

Why Reparations To African Descendants In The United States Are Essential To Democracy, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Can We Talk? How Triggers For Unconscious Racism Strengthen The Importance Of Dialogue, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro Jan 2009

Can We Talk? How Triggers For Unconscious Racism Strengthen The Importance Of Dialogue, Adjoa A. Aiyetoro

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Reparations And Equal Opportunity, David B. Lyons Jan 2004

Reparations And Equal Opportunity, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a sympathetic interpretation of reparations claims made on behalf of African Americans and suggests how they could properly be honored. It reviews the federal government’s role in supporting racial subordination and its continuing failure to address the inequitable consequences, which public policy now largely ignores. It sketches a national rectification project, comprising a comprehensive set of public programs that would attack the persisting legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The programs can be justified by the government’s duty to insure equal opportunity for our society’s children and, most urgently, by corrective justice, because the inequities are attributable …


Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski Jan 1995

Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …


The Annapolis Poll Books Of 1800 And 1804: African American Voting In The Early Republic, David S. Bogen Jan 1991

The Annapolis Poll Books Of 1800 And 1804: African American Voting In The Early Republic, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.