Law Commons^™

Who Tells Your Story: The Legality Of And Shift In Racial Preferences Within Casting Practices, Nicole Ligon

Faculty Scholarship

Expressing racial preferences in casting calls and hiring practices is nothing new. Producers of television shows, movies, and Broadway musicals have regularly and explicitly sought to hire actors and actresses with certain physical characteristics, including race, in casting their productions. And, given that the industry seemingly accepted this standard when it favored white talent, the public heard little about it. To the extent controversy arose, courts quelled concerns in a swift and easy fashion, without consideration of the societal harms or impacts that stereotyped or limited portrayals of minorities in entertainment could have on the public’s perception of people of …

Dignity Transacted, Lu-In Wang, Zachary W. Brewster

Articles

In interactive customer service encounters, the dignity of the parties becomes the currency of a commercial transaction. Service firms that profit from customer satisfaction place great emphasis on emotional labor, the work that service providers do to make customers feel cared for and esteemed. But performing emotional labor can deny dignity to workers, by highlighting their subservience and requiring them to suppress their own emotions in an effort to elevate the status and experiences of their customers. Paradoxically, the burden of performing emotional labor may also impose transactional costs on some customers by facilitating discrimination in service delivery. Drawing on …

Foreword To Latcrit 2017 Symposium: What's Next? Resistance Resilience And Community In The Trump Era, Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Jorge R. Roig, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Articles

In this Foreword, we strive to contextualize “LatCrit XXI: What’s Next?” against the backdrop of two crises: the current political crisis in the United States and the continuing crisis of scarcity that impacts the legal academy. Through an examination of these crises, we will reveal how LatCrit scholars, in their efforts to build community and in their commitment to critical outsider scholarship, are part of the constellations of resistance that struggle against el mundo malo. We will argue that LatCrit has become a necessary institution for those seeking to engage in persistent resistance and dissent in the critical and progressive …

Rwu Law News: The E-Newsletter Of Roger Williams University School Of Law January 2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Virtual Hatred: How Russia Tried To Start A Race War In The United States, William J. Aceves

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Russian government engaged in a sophisticated strategy to influence the U.S. political system and manipulate American democracy. While most news reports have focused on the cyber-attacks aimed at Democratic Party leaders and possible contacts between Russian officials and the Trump presidential campaign, a more pernicious intervention took place. Throughout the campaign, Russian operatives created hundreds of fake personas on social media platforms and then posted thousands of advertisements and messages that sought to promote racial divisions in the United States. This was a coordinated propaganda effort. Some Facebook and Twitter posts denounced the …

White Caller Crime: Racialized Police Communication And Existing While Black, Chan Tov Mcnamarah

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Over the past year, reports to the police about Black persons engaged in innocuous behaviors have bombarded the American consciousness. What do we make of them? And, equally important, what are the consequences of such reports?

This Article is the first to argue that the recent spike in calls to the police against Black persons who are simply existing must be understood as a systematic phenomenon which it dubs racialized police communication. The label captures two related practices. First, racially motivated police reporting—calls, complaints, or reports made when Black persons are engaged in behavior that would not have been read …

Diversity Drift, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Diversity may be under attack in the age of Trump, but higher education in America has its own diversity problem. If mission statements and strategic plans offer any guidance, many of America’s colleges and universities actively value diversity. Yet even as calls for diversity grow, these calls far too often lack a clear and coherent normative anchor. Institutions often seek “diversity” without first having done the work to define, precisely, why they want diversity, or to identify, concretely, what sorts of diversity will get them there.

As a result, universities have become susceptible to diversity drift, whereby good intentions invite …

The Structural Dimensions Of Race: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Binary Disruptions, Cedric Merlin Powell

Faculty Scholarship

Disrupting traditional conceptions of structural inequality, state decision making power, and the presumption of Black criminality, this Essay explores the doctrinal and policy implications of James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own, and Paul Butler’s evocative and transformative book, Chokehold. While both books grapple with how to dismantle the structural components of mass incarceration, state legitimized police violence against Black bodies, and how policy functions to reify oppressive state power, the approaches espoused by Forman and Butler are analytically distinct. Forman locates his analysis in the dynamics of decision-making power when African American officials wield power …

Dismantling Structural Inequality: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, And Race-Based Policing - A Symposium Summary, Cedric Merlin Powell, Laura R. Mcneal

Faculty Scholarship

The prominence of the carceral state in American society serves to undermine basic principles of democracy and justice, disproportionately displacing people of color and excluding them from all viable avenues of citizenship.

Time Is Not On Our Side: Why Specious Claims Of Collective Bargaining Rights Should Not Be Allowed To Delay Police Reform Efforts, Ayesha Bell Hardaway

Faculty Publications

Many view the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 as the best chance for police departments to make meaningful and lasting improvements. That legislation provides the federal government with the authority to investigate and sue local law enforcement agencies for engaging in a pattern or practice of policing that violates the rights of individuals. However, police unions have attempted to intervene in structural reform litigation designed to remedy unconstitutional policing practices. Those attempts have largely been based on employment rights conferred through collective bargaining laws and similar employment protections. The unions argue that the …

Etched In Stone: Historic Preservation Law And Confederate Monuments, Jess R. Phelps, Jessica Owley

Articles

This Article examines the current controversy regarding Confederate monuments. While many have focused on the removal of these commemorative objects, the legal framework regarding their protection has not been fully explored. This Article provides an in-depth understanding of the application of historic preservation laws to monument removal efforts and examines the impact of these federal, state, and local laws. The examination raises significant questions about the permanency of preservation laws generally. This Article considers how historic significance is evaluated and valued, noting the lack of flexibility and absence of mechanisms for reevaluating past protection decisions. This Article uses the Confederate …

Unbowed, Unbroken, And Unsung: The Unrecognized Contributions Of African American Women In Social Movement, Politics, And The Maintenance Of Democracy, Patricia A. Broussard

Journal Publications

Black women have made huge contributions to American society in movements, politics, and maintenance of the democracy. Black women have been relegated to footnotes, turned in memes, and largely ignored in politics and other areas of power. Notwithstanding the disrespect, disregard, and failures of the larger society to acknowledge that black own have made significant contributions, not only in the in entertainment industry, but in numerous other ways that have shaped out cultural and political landscape, black women's contributions to the larger society have been huge and impactful; yet there are so many blank spaces where their stories should reside. …

The Brandeis Thought Experiment: Reflection On The Elimination Of Racial Bias In The Legal System, Patrick C. Brayer

Faculty Works

This essay prompts the reader to engage in a thought experiment and consider their own limits in advancing the cause of; a legal system free from racism and bias, and lawyers are encouraged to use the experience of a young Louis Brandeis as a guide in this self-reflection. Specifically, this essay calls attention to the fact that Louis Brandeis started his legal career, at the same time when, and in the same place where thousands of African Americans were escaping persecution and traveling in search of economic and political freedom, yet he was publicly absent on issues of race. As …

Is Korematsu Good Law?, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

In Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court claimed to overrule its infamous Korematsu decision. This Essay argues that this claim is both empty and grotesque. It is empty because a decision to overrule a prior case is not meaningful unless it specifies which propositions the Court is disavowing. Korematsu stands for many propositions, not all of which are agreed upon, but the Hawaii Court underspecifies what it meant to overrule. The Court’s claim of overruling Korematsu is grotesque because its emptiness means to conceal its disturbing affinity with that case.

Failed Protectors: The Indian Trust And Killers Of The Flower Moon, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Michigan Law Review

Review of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

The Outcome Of Influence: Hitler’S American Model And Transnational Legal History, Mary L. Dudziak

Michigan Law Review

Review of James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.

The New Housing Segregation: The Jim Crow Effects Of Crime-Free Housing Ordinances, Deborah N. Archer

Michigan Law Review

America is profoundly segregated along racial lines. We attend separate schools, live in separate neighborhoods, attend different churches, and shop at different stores. This rigid racial segregation results in social, economic, and resource inequality, with White communities of opportunity on the one hand and many communities of color without access to quality schools, jobs, transportation, or health care on the other. Many people view this as an unfortunate fact of life, or as a relic of legal systems long since overturned and beyond the reach of current legal process. But this is not true. On the contrary, the law continues …

The End Of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas, Ben Grunwald, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012.

Our results suggest …

Hidden In Plain Sight: A More Compelling Case For Diversity, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

For four decades, the diversity rationale has offered a lifeline to affirmative action in higher education. Yet even after forty years, this critical feature of equal protection doctrine remains constitutionally insecure and politically fraught. Legal challenges persist, the Justice Department has launched a new assault on race-conscious admissions, and an impending shift on the Supreme Court could usher in an era of increased hostility toward the concept of diversity itself. The future of race-conscious admissions arguably hangs in the balance.

In this Article, I argue that the diversity rationale’s present fragility rests, in part, on its defenders’ failure to center …

Death By Stereotype: Race, Ethnicity, And California’S Failure To Implement Furman’S Narrowing Requirement, Catherine M. Grosso, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Michael Laurence, David C. Baldus, George W. Woodworth, Richard Newell

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the possible racial and ethnic implications of California’s expansive death penalty statute in light of the Eighth Amendment’s requirement that each state statute narrow the subclass of offenders on whom a death sentence may be imposed. The narrowing requirement derives from the holding in Furman v. Georgia over forty-five years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that existing death penalty statutes violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments. Citing statistics demonstrating arbitrary and capricious application of capital punishment, a majority of the Justices concluded that a death sentencing scheme is unconstitutional if it …

Police Contact And The Legal Socialization Of Urban Teens, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Amanda Geller

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary American policing has routinized involuntary police contacts with young people through frequent, sometimes intrusive investigative stops. Personal experience with the police has the potential to corrode adolescents’ relationships with law and skew law-related behaviors. We use the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate how adolescents’ experiences with the police shape their legal socialization. We find that both personal and vicarious police contact are associated with increased legal cynicism. Associations are present across racial groups and are not explained by teens’ behaviors, school settings, or family backgrounds. Legal cynicism is amplified in teens reporting intrusive contact but diminished …

Race Ipsa Loquitur, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The goal of this Article is to make the existence of invidious racial discrimination in the United States so palpable that it can no longer be denied. Part I argues that racial inequality is so pervasive, unconscious, and structural that it has simply become an assumed fixture of United States and is rarely even noticed. Section I.A describes the history of racial subordination in the United States. Section I.B invokes the concept of disparate impact to illustrate the continuing manifestations of invidious discrimination in contemporary culture. Part II describes the manner in which the culture nevertheless chooses to deny the …

The New Impartial Jury Mandate, Richard Lorren Jolly

Michigan Law Review

Impartiality is the cornerstone of the Constitution’s jury trial protections. Courts have historically treated impartiality as procedural in nature, meaning that the Constitution requires certain prophylactic procedures that secure a jury that is more likely to reach verdicts impartially. But in Peña- Rodriguez v. Colorado, 137 S. Ct. 855 (2017), the Supreme Court recognized for the first time an enforceable, substantive component to the mandate. There, the Court held that criminal litigants have a Sixth Amendment right to jury decisions made without reliance on extreme bias, specifically on the basis of race or national origin. The Court did not …

“Essentially Black”: Legal Theory And The Morality Of Conscious Racial Identity, Kenneth B. Nunn

UF Law Faculty Publications

In philosophy, essentialism involves the claim that everything that exists has a fundamental character or core set of features that makes it what it is. Although this idea developed out of Platonic notions of ideal forms, it has spread beyond philosophy into the social sciences and hard scientific disciplines like mathematics and biology. Since the advent of postmodernism, discussions around essentialism have become controversial. Adherents of postmodern theory argue that social categories, such as gender, race, and sexuality are socially constructed and that essentialist notions of identity, which suggest that identity is static, natural, and unchanging, are theoretically wrong. This …