Law Commons^™

A Call For An Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach To Addressing The Criminalization Of Black Girls, Donna Coker, Thalia González

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The persistent criminalization and pathologizing of Black youth in the U.S. educational system is a fundamental driver for their entry into the criminal legal system. Despite decades of evidence of the far-reaching harms of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and, more recently, demands from Black Lives Matter activists to defund school police, the role of schools in criminalizing Black girls has been left out of mainstream academic discourse. This occurs even though Black girls experience some of the most subjective and discriminatory practices in schools and evidence of an upward trend in discipline disparities since the mid-2000s. For Black girls with …

Against Shaming: Preserving Dignity, Decency, And A Moral-Educative Mission In American Schools, Amanda Harmon Cooley

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

While there has been an extensive amount of scholarly discourse regarding the propriety of shaming as a criminal sanction, there has been almost no critical discussion about the validity of shaming punishments as disciplinary measures in schools. This Article is designed to initiate this needed dialogue by arguing for the cessation of school shaming through a legal theory lenses. To accomplish this objective, Part I of this Article provides a definitional foundation of shaming punishments. Part II of the Article presents the normative rejection of school shaming, which is grounded in both legal punishment theory and educational theory. It …

The Problem Of Religious Learning, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The problem of religious learning is that religion—including the teaching about religion—must be separated from liberal public education, but that the two cannot be entirely separated if the aims of liberal public education are to be realized. It is a problem that has gone largely unexamined by courts, constitutional scholars, and other legal theorists. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has offered a few terse statements about the permissibility of teaching about religion in its Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and scholars frequently urge policies for or against such controversial subjects as Intelligent Design or graduation prayers, insufficient attention has been paid to …