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Why The Civil Rights Cases Belong In The Anti-Canon: Black Citizenship, The Fourteenth Amendment, And Judicial Interposition, Matthew Norman, Christopher Bryant
Why The Civil Rights Cases Belong In The Anti-Canon: Black Citizenship, The Fourteenth Amendment, And Judicial Interposition, Matthew Norman, Christopher Bryant
ConLawNOW
This essay analyzes the Supreme Court’s ruling in The Civil Rights Cases (1883) and surveys both contemporary and scholarly responses to it. Citizenship should mean something, and the Court’s ruling in The Civil Rights Cases invalidated much of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the most ambitious and progressive civil rights legislation that Congress enacted prior to 1964. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dred Scott, Abraham Lincoln warned of a sequel that would nationalize slavery. While the Thirteenth Amendment eliminated the possibility of such a decision, Dred Scott is widely recognized as one of the Court’s …
Symposium: Examining Black Citizenship From Reconstruction To Black Lives Matter: Black Citizenship, Dehumanization, And The Fourteenth Amendment, Reginald Oh
ConLawNOW
The fight for full Black citizenship has been in large measure a fight against the systematic dehumanization of African Americans. Dehumanization is the process of treating people as less than human, as subhuman. Denying Blacks full and equal citizenship has gone hand in hand with denying their full humanity. To effectively promote equal citizenship for African Americans, therefore, requires an explicit commitment to ending their dehumanization. This essay examines the concept of dehumanization and its connection to formal, political, civil, and social citizenship. It elaborates on the less familiar idea of social citizenship, entailing the right to have personal relationships …
Symposium: Examining Black Citizenship From Reconstruction To Black Lives Matter: Rhetoric And Nostalgia In The Criminal Justice Reform Movement, Michael Gentithes
Symposium: Examining Black Citizenship From Reconstruction To Black Lives Matter: Rhetoric And Nostalgia In The Criminal Justice Reform Movement, Michael Gentithes
ConLawNOW
Today’s movement for criminal justice reform and its attendant "defund the police" slogan contain nuanced calls to redirect public funds in ways that will both control crime and support downtrodden neighborhoods. But the language in those calls can easily be misinterpreted. Such poor messaging misleads both the movement’s members and the public in two important ways. First, it repeats many of the mistakes made by protest anthems of the past. For too many Americans enduring today’s all-too-real dystopia, calls to defund sound like calls to anarchy, not arguments for peaceable, sensible reforms. Second, defunding rhetoric contains an element of historical …