Law Commons^™

A New Atticus Is Afoot: The Portrayal Of Lawyers In Popular Culture, Anna Thrush

Senior Theses

This project analyzes the stereotypical image of lawyers in popular culture, focusing on either overly demonic or unrealistically heroic. Both stereotypes that are common portrayals of attorneys in popular culture are unrealistic and deny society a true comprehension of the profession. Popular culture has molded the image of lawyers to the characteristics that sell, rather than focusing on a realistic portrayal. Therefore, popular culture creates a falsely dramatized image of attorneys to generate revenue, putting the reputation and future of the profession as risk. These stereotypes are exemplified in this project through a close literary analysis of lawyer characters from …

Othering In Immigration Laws, Andrea Wright, Quenten Jackson, Cesar Raymundo

Immigration Scholarship: History, Trends and Development in Global Immigration

The ethical wrongs in immigration laws severely impact what it means to be an immigrant American citizen. The Hispanic and Latino groups experience “citizenship” in the United States in a way that portrays them as uneducated and poor criminals, and this paper seeks to understand the reasoning behind this unfair reputation. In order to answer questions of ethics and law, this paper begins with studying the root of othering, regarding immigration in the United States. This research paper investigates the evolution of race-based exclusion laws in immigration and focuses on the relationship between these exclusion laws and race hierarchy in …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Review Of Ruth Objects: The Life Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg By Doreen Rappaport, Grace Kohler

Library Intern Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Criminal Justice Bias: Fact Or Fiction, Hiba Mobarak

Quest

Objective Analysis

Research in progress for CRIJ 1301: Introduction to Criminal Justice

Faculty Mentor: Stefanie LeMaire

The following paper represents work produced by a student in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course at Collin College. The paper is an objective analysis of prominent research regarding potential police biases and how officers’ decisions may be influenced by a suspect’s race. The topic of racial bias within policing is quite controversial, as evidenced by the community protests, media coverage, and destruction that has ensued after officer-involved shootings. This assignment asks students to objectively review scholarly research on police bias and constructively criticize …

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

Cleaner, Greener, Healthier: A Prescription For Stronger Canadian Environmental Laws And Policies By David R. Boyd, Alex D. Ketchum

The Goose

Review of David R. Boyd's Cleaner, Greener, Healthier: A Prescription for Stronger Canadian Environmental Laws and Policies.

The Body Subject To The Laws: Louise Erdrich’S Metaphorical Incarnation Of Federal Indian Law In "The Round House", Laurel Jimenez

Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship

Author Louise Erdrich, a member of the Chippewa tribe in North Dakota, is renowned for addressing historical and current social justice issues facing Native Americans in many of her critically acclaimed novels. The Round House is no exception. Erdrich begins her novel by describing a violent attack against the young protagonist's mother; an attack that is only made possible by the systemic racism and lack of tribal sovereignty that underpins Federal Indian Law and policy. Erdrich transmutes the evil couched within those laws into one deplorable incident. The unfolding affects from that incident expose how-- not only historically, but even …

Dreading He Knew Not What: Masculinities, Structural Spaces, Law And The Gothic In The Castle Of Otranto, Pride And Prejudice, And Wuthering Heights, Samantha E. Morse

Pitzer Senior Theses

This essay investigates the integral linkages between Gothic spaces and Gothic masculinities in three texts: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). At the core of this examination is architecture, or more specifically, the physical constructions and built environments that comprise a man’s property. I explore how a man uses his property to construct, legitimize, and perform his identity. In the Female Gothic, the home is a place of anxiety for women, where patriarchal dominance and violence reign to constrain female agency. I argue that the home is …

Memory Of A Racist Past — Yazoo: Integration In A Deep-Southern Town By Willie Morris, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

Willie Morris was in many ways larger than life. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, he moved with his family to Yazoo City, Mississippi at the age of six months. He attended and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin where his scathing editorials against racism in the South earned him the hatred of university officials. After graduation, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. He would join Harper’s Magazine in 1963, rising to become the youngest editor-in-chief in the magazine’s history. He remained at this post until 1971 when he resigned amid dropping ad sales and a lack of …

From Natural Law To Natural Inferiority: The Construction Of Racist Jurisprudence In Early Virginia, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Science informed American jurisprudence during the age of the Revolution. Colonials used science and naturalism to navigate the wilderness, define themselves against the British, and forge a new national identity and constitutional order. American legal historians have long noted the influence of science upon the Founding generation, and historians of American slavery have casually noted the influence of science upon early American racism as organized and standardized in slave codes. This article seeks to synthesize the work of American legal historians and historians of American slavery by showing how natural law jurisprudence, anchored in scientific discourse and vocabulary, brought about …

'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. The study of law in Anglo-India is particularly telling, if troubling, because India served as ‘a model for …

The Word And The State, Hadley Ajana

Hadley Ajana

J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians has been widely interpreted as a political allegory about the use of torture in a security state. This interpretation, though valid, limits the story’s significance. The novel has a broader theme that transcends apartheid and European colonization of Africa in the twentieth century. Coetzee broadcasts a universal message: when words are divorced from truth, the law will not serve justice. This insight applies to contemporary America’s War on Terror.