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Full-Text Articles in Law

Race, Rules, And Disregarded Reality, Marsha Griggs Jan 2021

Race, Rules, And Disregarded Reality, Marsha Griggs

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Exploring issues of racial bias and social injustice in the law school classroom is a modern imperative. Yet, important conversations about systemic inequality in the law and legal profession are too often dissociated from core doctrinal courses and woodenly siloed to the periphery of the curriculum. This dissociation creates a paradigm of irrelevancy-by-omission that disregards the realities of the lived experiences of our students and the clients they will ultimately serve. Using Evidence as a launch pad, Professor Deborah Merritt has paved a pathway to incorporate these disregarded realities in doctrinal teaching. This important pathway leads to safe spaces necessary …


The Injustice Of Inclusion And Fair Opportunity: Exploiting Children In Medical Research For The Benefit Of An Unworthy Society, Ruqaiijah Yearby Jan 2015

The Injustice Of Inclusion And Fair Opportunity: Exploiting Children In Medical Research For The Benefit Of An Unworthy Society, Ruqaiijah Yearby

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The history of pediatric medical research has been characterized as a history of child abuse. Usually, the debate regarding the use of children in medical research has centered on questions of Autonomy (informed consent) and Beneficence (the best interest of the child based on a benefit risk analysis). The debate has rarely focused on the question of which children should participate in medical research by discussing the legal principle of Justice (prohibits use of vulnerable populations for medical research who are already overly burdened for medical research unrelated to health issues affecting them and requires that populations who participate in …


To Count And Be Counted: A Response To Professor Levinson, Marcia L. Mccormick Jan 2014

To Count And Be Counted: A Response To Professor Levinson, Marcia L. Mccormick

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This Essay deepens the discussion Professor Levinson began in his lecture for the Richard J. Childress Memorial Lecture at SLU Law, Who Counts?. Professor Levinson explored the question of who counts as a member of the US community, and who gets to decide who counts. Inevitably, given our history of exclusion on the basis of race and sex, questions about belonging and race and sex form a central part of the current debate. Labeling a person with a race and sex presupposes the questions of what makes a person a certain race or sex? This essay explores what identity …


A Lawyer Looks At Civil Disobedience: How Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Reframed The Civil Rights Revolution, Anders Walker Jan 2014

A Lawyer Looks At Civil Disobedience: How Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Reframed The Civil Rights Revolution, Anders Walker

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This essay reconstructs Lewis F. Powell, Jr.’s thoughts on the civil rights movement by focusing on a series of little-known speeches that he delivered in the 1960s lamenting the practice of civil disobedience endorsed by Martin Luther King, Jr. Convinced that the law had done all it could for blacks, Powell took issue with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, impugning its invocation of civil disobedience and rejecting its calls for compensatory justice to make up for slavery and Jim Crow. Dismissive of reparations, Powell developed a separate basis for supporting diversity that hinged on distinguishing American pluralism from Soviet totalitarianism. …


The New Jim Crow? Recovering The Progressive Origins Of Mass Incarceration, Anders Walker Jan 2014

The New Jim Crow? Recovering The Progressive Origins Of Mass Incarceration, Anders Walker

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This article revisits the claim that mass incarceration constitutes a new form of racial segregation, or JimCrow. Drawing from historical sources, it demonstrates that proponents of the analogy miss an important commonality between the two phenomena, namely the debt that each owe to progressive and/or liberal politics. Though generally associated with repression and discrimination, both Jim Crow and massincarceration owe their existence in part to enlightened reforms aimed at promoting black interests; albeit with perverse results. Recognizing the aspirational origins of systematic discrimination marks an important facet of comprehending the persistence of racial inequality in the United States.


House To House: Mergers, Annexations, & The Racial Implications Of City-County Politics In St. Louis, Anders Walker Jan 2014

House To House: Mergers, Annexations, & The Racial Implications Of City-County Politics In St. Louis, Anders Walker

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According to most scholars, Jim Crow's death elevated African Americans even as white departures depressed them, condemning blacks to isolated neighborhoods, segregated schools, and crumbling urban cores. To counter such reversals, liberals endorsed the consolidation of urban and suburban zones, hoping that such moves might thwart flight, promote integration, and ameliorate the effects of what scholars began in the 1970s to term “institutional” or “structural” racism. Initially such efforts focused primarily on schools, but quickly expanded to include other types of consolidation as well, including the consolidation, or merger, of major metropolitan areas and surrounding counties. While the rubric of …


“To Corral And Control”: Stop, Frisk, And The Geography Of Freedom, Anders Walker Jan 2014

“To Corral And Control”: Stop, Frisk, And The Geography Of Freedom, Anders Walker

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This article revisits the emergence of stop and frisk law in the 1960s to make three points. One, the impetus for formalizing police stops arose midst confusion generated by Mapp v. Ohio, the landmark Warren Court opinion incorporating the exclusionary rule to the states. Two, police over-reactions to Mapp intersected with fears of urban riots, leading to a formalization of stop and frisk rules that aimed at better containing inner city minority populations. Three, the heightened control of urban streets coupled with the heightened protection of the private home bore geographic implications, interiorizing liberty in ways that perpetuated a national …


Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo Jan 2010

Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo

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The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (“GINA”) is the first federal, uniform protection against the use of genetic information in both the workplace and health insurance. Signed into law on May 21, 2008, GINA prohibits an employer or health insurer from acquiring or using an individual’s genetic information, with some exceptions. One of the goals of GINA is to eradicate actual, or perceived, discrimination based on genetic information in the workplace and in health insurance. Although the threat of genetic discrimination is often discussed in universal terms - as something that could happen to any of us - the …


Back To Color Blindness: Recent Developments In Race Discrimination Law In The United States, Marcia L. Mccormick Jan 2010

Back To Color Blindness: Recent Developments In Race Discrimination Law In The United States, Marcia L. Mccormick

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The United States has a long and somewhat conflicted history of espousing egalitarian values and yet tolerating a certain level of subordination of particular groups to a greater or lesser extent at the same time. Like many countries, it struggles with reconciling the goals of equality, pluralism, and liberty, and the balance has been struck differently at different times. In the current wave of such efforts, the Supreme Court is marking an increasingly formalist approach to the question of discrimination, while Congress appears to be pushing a slightly more substantive approach to discrimination. This short paper analyzes the Court’s recent …


The Violent Bear It Away: Emmett Till & The Modernization Of Law Enforcement In Mississippi, Anders Walker Jan 2009

The Violent Bear It Away: Emmett Till & The Modernization Of Law Enforcement In Mississippi, Anders Walker

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Few racially motivated crimes have left a more lasting imprint on American memory than the death of Emmett Till. Yet, even as Till's murder in Mississippi in 1955 has come to be remembered as a catalyst for the civil rights movement, it contributed to something else as well. Precisely because it came on the heels of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Till's death convinced Mississippi Governor James P. Coleman that certain aspects of the state's handling of racial matters had to change. Afraid that popular outrage over racial violence might encourage federal intervention in …


Striving For Equality, But Settling For The Status Quo: Is Title Vi More Illusory Than Real?, Ruqaiijah Yearby Jan 2007

Striving For Equality, But Settling For The Status Quo: Is Title Vi More Illusory Than Real?, Ruqaiijah Yearby

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A plethora of empirical studies, such as the Institute of Medicine’s Unequal Treatment report, have shown that racial inequities in health care continue at the same level as in the Jim Crow Era. Innumerable reasons have been offered to explain the continuation of these health inequities, including racial discrimination. Congress enacted Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to put an end to racial discrimination in health care, but it still persists. Given the regulation and enforcement mechanisms established under Title VI explicitly aimed at remedying racial discrimination such as that directed at elderly African-Americans it is unbelievable …


Ending The Exploitation Of The Vulnerable: The Promise Of The Intersection Of American Bioethics, Human Rights, And Health Law, Ruqaiijah Yearby Jan 2005

Ending The Exploitation Of The Vulnerable: The Promise Of The Intersection Of American Bioethics, Human Rights, And Health Law, Ruqaiijah Yearby

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Traditionally, American bioethics has served as a safety net for the rich and powerful, for they are not forced to act as research subjects to obtain access to general health care for themselves or their children. However, American bioethics has failed to protect the vulnerable, i.e. indigent minorities. The vulnerable are not treated the same as the rich. They do not have access to health care. They are exploited in clinical trials that promise monetary gain or access to health care and their autonomy rights are often ignored. Some of the vulnerable most affected by these disparities are African-Americans. African-Americans …


Is It Too Late For Title Vi Enforcement?: Seeking Redemption Of The Unequal Long Term Care System In The United States Through International Means, Ruqaiijah Yearby Jan 2005

Is It Too Late For Title Vi Enforcement?: Seeking Redemption Of The Unequal Long Term Care System In The United States Through International Means, Ruqaiijah Yearby

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Legal and medical experts have noted continued racism in the health care system that prevents the equal distribution of quality care. Initially most racism was intentional and expressed through de jure segregation, as evidenced by federal funding of the construction of racial segregated health care facilities. Now most racism, expressed through de facto segregation, is subtly incorporated into the daily practices of institutions causing an adverse disparate impact on African-Americans. This institutional racism establishes separate and independent barriers through the neutral denial of opportunities and equal rights to individuals and groups that results from the normal operations of the institutions …