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Reconstruction's Lessons, Susan D. Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In the current moment in the legal struggle for racial justice in the United States, the Nation appears at risk of repeating its history. The country stands at a time of some hope but more cause for pessimism. The current United States Supreme Court has exhibited hostility towards key legal priorities of the racial justice movement, and all indications point to this trend continuing or getting even worse. Leading commentators on race issues have suggested that the United States is headed back to the post Reconstruction era, sometimes referred to as “Redemption” in reference to southern states’ reassertion of white …

John Osborn's Enduring Words On Law & Learning, Walter Effross

Popular Media

When I started my first year at Harvard Law School, 17 years after Osborn did, I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. But I expected to be — and was — intimidated by Socratic taskmasters who, like the movie version of Osborn’s Professor Kingsfield (a role for which John Houseman won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 1973), were ready with “always another question, another question to follow your answer.”

A Critical Jeffersonian Mind For A Community Reinvestment Bind, Chaz Brooks

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ("CRA") primarily sought to remedy decades of government sanctioned disinvestment in so-called “redlined communities.” Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and later the Federal Housing Administration, the United States of America created from whole cloth a structure that encouraged and subsidized the explosion of homeownership in white American households. Following decades of racialized wealth generation, the United States had a change of heart. Congress determined that financiers needed a gentle push to invest fairly. Additionally, Congress wanted one thing clear in the drafting of this remedy—it must not allocate credit.

This essay considers how …

The Failed Idea Of Judicial Restraint: A Brief Intellectual History, Susan D. Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay examines the intellectual history of the idea of judicial restraint, starting with the early debates among the US Constitution’s founding generation. In the late nineteenth century, law professor James Bradley Thayer championed the concept and passed it on to his students and others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, who modified and applied it based on the jurisprudential preoccupations of a different era. In a masterful account, Brad Snyder examines Justice Frankfurter’s attempt to put the idea into practice. Although Frankfurter arguably made a mess of it, he passed the idea of …