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Full-Text Articles in Law

Advancing Racial Justice Through Civil And Criminal Academic Medical-Legal Partnerships, Yael Cannon, Vida Johnson Jan 2023

Advancing Racial Justice Through Civil And Criminal Academic Medical-Legal Partnerships, Yael Cannon, Vida Johnson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The medical-legal partnership (MLP) model, which brings attorneys and healthcare partners together to remove legal barriers to health, is a growing approach to addressing unmet civil legal needs. But MLPs are less prevalent in criminal defense settings, where they also have the potential to advance both health and legal justice. In fact, grave racial health inequities are deeply intertwined with both civil and criminal injustice. In both spheres, health justice is racial justice. Building on the experiences of the authors in their respective civil and criminal law school clinics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., this Article argues that academic …


Random Justice, Girardeau A. Spann Mar 2022

Random Justice, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As recent Senate confirmation practices suggest, the Supreme Court is best understood as the head of a political branch of government, whose Justices are chosen in a process that makes their ideological views dispositive. Throughout the nation’s history, the Supreme Court has exercised its governing political ideology in ways that sacrifice the interests of nonwhites in order to advance the interests of Whites. In the present moment of heightened cultural sensitivity to structural discrimination and implicit bias, it would make sense to use affirmative action to help remedy the racially disparate distribution of societal resources that has been produced by …


#Blacklivesmatter: From Protest To Policy, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh Oct 2021

#Blacklivesmatter: From Protest To Policy, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In summer 2020, mass protests spread across the globe challenging police brutality and racial injustice and demanding change. Fueled by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, these protests drew 15 million to 26 million participants in the United States alone to participate in late May and June of 2020. The sheer scale of these protests made them the largest movement in U.S. history. While there has been some consensus that this unprecedented protest movement pushed social awareness and changed the national conversation around race, existing research has yet to clearly …


#Blacklivesmatter—Getting From Contemporary Social Movements To Structural Change, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh Jun 2021

#Blacklivesmatter—Getting From Contemporary Social Movements To Structural Change, Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey, Lisa O. Singh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

From the haters and hackers to propaganda and privacy concerns, social media often deserves its bad reputation. But the sustained activism that followed George Floyd’s death and the ongoing movement for racial justice also demonstrated how social media can be a crucial mechanism of social change. We saw how online and on-the-ground activism can fuel each other and build momentum in ways neither can achieve in isolation. We have seen in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and more specifically the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, a new and powerful approach to using social media that goes beyond symbolic “slacktivism” and performative allyship …


Setting The Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice In The Post-Pandemic Clinic, Emily Benfer, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Cannon, Medha Makhlouf, Tomar Pierson-Brown Jan 2021

Setting The Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice In The Post-Pandemic Clinic, Emily Benfer, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Cannon, Medha Makhlouf, Tomar Pierson-Brown

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced and deepened entrenched preexisting health injustice in the United States. Racialized, marginalized, poor, and hyper-exploited populations suffered disproportionately negative outcomes due to the pandemic. The structures that generate and sustain health inequity in the United States—including in access to justice, housing, health care, employment, and education—have produced predictably disparate results. The authors, law school clinicians and professors involved with medical-legal partnerships, discuss the lessons learned by employing a health justice framework in teaching students to address issues of health inequity during the pandemic. The goal of health justice is to eliminate health disparities that are linked …


Massive Resistance--The Remix: Anti-Black Policymaking And The Poisoning Of U.S. Public Education, Janel George Jan 2021

Massive Resistance--The Remix: Anti-Black Policymaking And The Poisoning Of U.S. Public Education, Janel George

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What is occurring today in state legislatures and school boards around the country—under the guise of conservative attacks on Critical Race Theory—is merely a remix of the same song of white supremacy in public education. This nation has witnessed the impact of legislative campaigns designed to undermine educational opportunity for Black students before. This article applies a Critical Race Theory approach to analyze the role of law and policy in replicating racial inequality in education. This article asserts that policymakers seeking to preserve white supremacy in education have invoked three primary legislative tactics over the years: (1) denying; (2) defunding; …


Fisher V. Grutter, Girardeau A. Spann Jan 2012

Fisher V. Grutter, Girardeau A. Spann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is no reason for the Supreme Court to have granted certiorari in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Unless, of course, the Court plans to overrule Grutter v. Bollinger—the case on which the Texas affirmative action plan at issue in Fisher was based. If that is its plan, the Court can invalidate the Texas program on some narrow ground that masks the magnitude of what it is doing. Or it can explicitly overrule Grutter—a case that no longer commands majority support on a Supreme Court whose politics of affirmative action has now been refashioned by …