Law Commons^™

A Thirteenth Amendment Framework For Combating Racial Profiling, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

Law enforcement officers’ use of race to single persons out for criminal suspicion (“racial profiling”) is the subject of much scrutiny and debate. This Article provides a new understanding of racial profiling. While scholars have correctly concluded that racial profiling should be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and existing federal statutes, this Article contends that the use of race as a proxy for criminality is also a badge and incident of slavery in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Racial profiling is not only a denial of the right to equal treatment, but …

Reparations As Redistribution, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

The most controversial, and most intriguing, remedy sought by proponents of slavery reparations involves massive redistribution of wealth from whites to blacks within the United States. This is not to say that reparations proponents have focused only on racial redistribution. Some have called for an official apology from the U.S. government. Others seek the creation of a foundation or institute, funded by U.S. tax dollars, to be devoted to furthering the interests of African Americans, including the funding of K- 12 educational programs for black children and the funding of general civil rights advocacy to counteract the lingering effects of …

Le 'Droit D'Avoir Des Droits': Les Revendications Des Ex-Esclaves À Cuba (1872-1909), Rebecca J. Scott, Michael Zeuske

Articles

In Cuba, a distinctive process of gradual emancipation brought a large number of enslaved and recently-freed men and women into the legal culture. What earlier might have remained oral or physical challenges now took legal form, as slaves and former slaves built alliances with those who could assist them in their appeals. The assertions of former slaves suggest an emerging conviction of a "right to have rights", going well beyond the immediate refusal of their own bondage. In this light, the office of the notary and the courts of first instance became places where freedom itself was constituted through the …

Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery.